Introduction
At the Domus Museum we have a space designed for activities with school groups called “Open Laboratory”. One of these activities is “Mouthfuls: when nutrition meets the SDGs”, a workshop to discover nutrition and its relationship with the SDGs.
This activity is aimed at school groups between 5th grade primary and 2nd ESO, with a maximum of 30 children per group and with an approximate duration of 90 minutes. It is complemented by a visit to the “Bocados” exhibition located in the museum, which deals with the 17 SDGs and the role they play in nutrition in a fun and interactive way.
Stages of implementation
Before welcoming the children, we prepare the material, which we are going to use in the workshop. We will focus on 3 SDGs: Zero Hunger (SDG 2), End Poverty (SDG 1) and Quality Education (SDG 6). We will work on each of them in a different activity.
We welcome the children, divide them into small groups of 4 or 5 and start the workshop by watching a video about the SDGs. At the end of the video, we will have a small group discussion (10 minutes) to find out their impressions on this topic.
Activity 1: Discover cereal (20 minutes).
In this first activity we work on SDG2 “Zero Hunger”. We start by talking about the importance of cereals as a pillar of food and we provide them with the material for the activity: samples of grains of the 8 most consumed cereals in the world and images of the plants of each of them, obtained from the Europeana digital library. We leave them a few minutes to observe them and give them an iPad to participate in the Kahoot game “Discover the cereal”.
Activity 2: Fruit for all (15 minutes).
This focuses on SDG1 “End Poverty”. Fruit is fundamental in our diet as it provides us with vitamins and minerals, so it is very important that everyone in the world has access to it.
We provided them with coloured sheets and templates with origami instructions for them to make 3 different fruits and we showed them more examples of origami on the Europeana website.
Activity 3: Be a molecular cook (20 minutes).
We will work on SDG4 “Quality education”. We will talk about the different ways of cooking food and how the nutritional value of prepared food can be maintained.
Schools are the perfect setting for children to learn how to eat in a healthy and sustainable way. It is very important that they know which foods are most suitable for them and how to cook them to make the most of their nutrients. The activity consists of preparing fake caviar with the materials we provide them with.
Outcomes
Children are very receptive to activities that mix games, science experiments, visual elements such as images and videos, technology and entertaining talks. This is the way we work as educators at the museum and we get very good results.
I could see that many of them did not know about the SDGs. Thanks to the games, experiments and images provided by Europeana, they were able to discover them in a very fun way. They also realised how important good nutrition is and that we need to learn how to eat in a healthy and sustainable way.
Link to the learning scenario implemented: Bites: when nutrition meets SDGs (LS-ME-554) – Teaching With Europeana (eun.org)
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PDM 1.0: the featured image used to illustrate this article has been found on Europeana and has been provided by the Nationalmuseum Sweden.
