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Eat insects at Xmas

Eat insects at Xmas

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 Resource from the ENGAGE project, which won 'best open educational resource (2017)'

 

Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup, a cockroach on my pizza, and a worm in my rice. There are 2000 kinds of edible insects, and perhaps we should all be eating them to reduce the emissions from raising animals. 

In this activity students are asked to plan a Christmas menu for the school canteen which contains tasty insect dishes alongside more familiar ones. Can they use persuasive communication, and their knowledge of natural resources, to get students to opt for the insect alternatives?

Blueprint curriculum link

  • Unit: Using resources
  • Concept: Product life-cycle: A product has an environmental impact during manufacture, use and disposal. Assessment of this impact allows changes to be made to reduce the impact
  • Skills: Write: Choose the appropriate style
  • Learning stage: Analyse

Weblinks

Lovely grub: are insects the future of food?

A comprehensive article on eating insects for teacher background reading

The FAO report on eating insects

Most of the data in this activity came from this FAO report on edible insects

Why not eat insects? TEDx talk

Professor Marcel Dicke from Wageningen UR makes an appetizing case for adding insects to everyone's diet.

Eat Grub

Why not offer your students some insects to try? Enter the code ENGAGEwithGRUB at the checkout for a 10% discount.

Customers rate us 4.7/5 based on 377 reviews.
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Q&A

For the Year 7 Mastery Practice book:

For the Y9/GCSE Mastery Practice Book:

It was written to help year 7 students learn to transfer the scientific knowledge to unfamiliar situation. It can also be used by students in other years to improve their understanding of the fundamental concepts. Learning to apply is what will give students access to the 60% of marks at GCSE that demand more than recalling content. The book uses a research-based approach to teach students how to solve different types of problems.

The Practice Book has a chapter on each unit in the year 7 curriculum, based on a 5-year curriculum and AQA's KS3 Science Syllabus. Download the sample material to see exactly what concepts and types of problems are included.

The first strategy studente need to learn is to evaluate the problem and what knowledge is needed to solve it. 'Detect' simulates how an expert looks at a question. They make sense of the situation, look beyond the superficial details to find the deep structure This allows them to recognise this as an example of a problem type they have seen before, and recall the organised information they need to solve - key concepts. It ensures that students avoid their inclination to just look at the keywords, and dive in risking misunderstanding the situation. Detect is broken down into smaller steps, usually: draw a diagram, show values, identify unknown, decide the concept

This encourages students to bring into their working memory all their existing knowledge, externalise it on paper (to reduce working memory demands), and then home in on what's relevant to solving the problem.

The third stage of the problem solving strategy is the actual solution process using the knowledge from Recall.The Solve starts by showing how to use the knowledge from Recall and models a step by step process of moving towards a solution for the problem.We teach students how to write answers scientifically, using a variety of structures like claim-evidence-reasoning, and problem-solution, and cause-effect.

We give a big discount if you want to buy 30+ books. Please contact us.

Customer Reviews

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Alex
Creating recipes

I used it with year 7, students created their own recipes. They did not like the idea of eating insects but after discussing the topic, watching the videos and analysing opinions from different perspectives, they then changed their mind. The material is very inspiring. A strategy to provoke their curiosity would be starting the lesson cooking insects, in order to make the context more fun with demonstrations. The science-in-the-news links were very useful. It was possible to connect the lesson with natural resources, ecosystems, sustainable actions and societal values. When they were able to include their knowledge, information analysed in the materials and evidence found in the multimedia references (news and TED video) they improved their writing significantly. However some students who were not able to justify their opinions with enough knowledge during the debate in peers had more difficulties to elaborate argumentative writing. Next time It might be worth to try different strategies for group discussion for peers to share questions, arguments, knowledge and evidence

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anne marie murphy

Eat insects at Xmas

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Natalia Drakonaki
Discussion

I tried this activity in my Geography class (age group: 12-13 years) and the results were really rewarding. Students expressed enormous interest. All of them became involved, they participated in the discussions and they handled efficiently their assignments. It led to a discussion about the inadequacy of earth’s resources due to population growth and what the solutions to that problem might be. Thank you!

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MaryB
Very accessible

A potentially boring, over-done topic of increasing demands on natural resources (yawn yawn to a Year 7 pupil). This Xmas menu activity makes the topic more ‘digestible’ and very accessible to all pupils. Pupils learned! Pupils enjoyed! = success. Thanks

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davekier
Love it

I have used this with my year 8 students and they loved it. I had them calculate how many different insects they would need to eat in order to have a balanced diet – they got really competitive to see who would finish first. Thanks again for this.

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