Save the Food! A Food Waste Prevention Course
Wasted food costs money and harms the environment. This five-lesson course explains basic concepts of food waste prevention and provides easy tips for students to follow, while offering useful and relevant English language exercises, money-saving tips, and skills for being a thoughtful citizen.
The course is designed to be implemented in five one-hour sessions: one session a week for five weeks. Each of the five lessons focuses on a food waste reduction topic or skill. The content was adapted from the EPA’s “Food: Too Good to Waste” toolkit.
The lessons are designed to function as individual stand-alone lessons. However, they work best when students attend all sessions and the lessons can build on each other.
ELL Level
The course is best suited for advanced levels, CASAS 225+ from Test Form 187/188, or TABE E/M 442-500. The course could also be utilized with high intermediate levels, CASAS 114, with extra scaffolding by the instructor.
Teacher’s Guide
Save the Food! Teacher’s Guide provides an overview of the course, a list of supplies for each lesson, references for source material and more information, and links to each lesson folder (also linked below).
Lessons
Each lesson is organized in a folder as follows:
- Lesson 1: Get Smart – Learn about food waste and why it matters.
- Lesson 2: Smart Shopping – Shop with your meals in mind, learn how to create meal plans and shopping lists.
- Lesson 3: Smart Storage – Learn to store food properly to help it last longer.
- Lesson 4: Smart Prep – Prep now, eat later, learn how to prep items and full meals to ensure everything you buy is eaten.
- Lesson 5: Eat First – Learn how to label and organize your food items to ensure food doesn’t spoil because it was forgotten about.
Each lesson includes:
- A teacher’s guide or lesson plan. The lesson plan is an outline of what is to be discussed in that session.
- A teacher’s manual PowerPoint presentation. The PowerPoint can guide the flow of the class and includes detailed speaker notes for each slide. Bolded speaker notes in the slide indicate questions to be asked of students.
- A key terms list.
- One or more activities.
- Answer keys for the activities.
Reducing Food Waste with Audrey
This video, Reducing Food Waste with Audrey, proves a quick overview of the food waste reduction strategies covered in the lessons, in the context of learning how to make West African Peanut Stew.
Connect on Mighty Networks!
The Mighty Network is an online space for teachers who are utilizing this curriculum to share their experience working with it, ask questions of other teachers, and provide suggestions. We encourage you to join our Mighty Network and share your experience and engage in conversation with fellow implementers of the Save The Food curriculum.
Instructions:
- Join the Network >>
- Read through the Welcome! Start Here article (under Featured at the top of the homepage) to learn how to use the Mighty Network. Posting works in a very similar way to other social networking platforms.
- Post your comments and questions about using the food waste prevention lessons, and respond to the comments that others post!
- NOTE: When you post about this course, click on Add Topic and choose “Save the Food!” Course. This will group the comments and make it much easier to find and respond to them.
