On 23th of April we gave a playful lesson again within the scope of the project Wasteless. It was a pleasure for us to draw the attention of more than 300 students to the problem of food wastage in three lessons.
Composting, consumer habits, best before and use by dates and the food-chain was also discussed on the event. However, we shocked the children and their teachers perhaps the most when we talked about the huge amount of food waste that is generated each year in Europe.
During the lessons we were in a very pleasant mood. The pupils of the 2-4 grades were very active, everybody wanted to remark on the topic and tell their own experiences. It was maybe the greatest challenge for us because it wasn’t easy to choose one raised hand from a hundred.
We learned that a lot of children apply composting and feeding every day as a technique to reduce food waste. Many of the students reported that sometimes it happens in their homes that yoghurt or mouldy bread ends up in the dustbin. Besides learning, of course, a quiz and team games were also parts of the event, during which we were surprised how easily the children acquired the knowledge in the first part of it. The evidence is that we ran out of our stock of pens and balloons, those small gifts that the students got for their correct answers.
In Szigetszentmiklós we could play and teach but also learn a lot from the children again. We hope that we will have such opportunities in the future to draw the students’ attention to the importance of preventing food wastage.