1.1+Theories+guiding+learning+through+the+kitchen+garden

Ecological literacyFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia All education is environmental education… by what is included or excluded we teach the young that they are part of or apart from the natural world... ecoliteracy does not only require mastery of subject matter, but the creation of meaningful connections between head, hands, and heart as well.[|[][|6][[[|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_literacy#cite_note-5]|]]]
 * Ecological literacy** (also referred to as //ecoliteracy//) is the ability to understand the [|natural systems] that make [|life] on [|earth] possible. To be ecoliterate means understanding the principles of organization of ecological communities (i.e. [|ecosystems]) and using those principles for creating sustainable human communities. An ecologically literate society would be a [|sustainable] [|society] which did not destroy the [|natural environment] on which they depend. Ecological literacy is a powerful concept as it creates a foundation for an integrated approach to environmental problems.

A Naturalistic Approach to Language
**Introduction to A Naturalistic Approach to Language**

This approach to oral language enables students to use practical and social language skills in a naturalistic setting. “The goal of activity based intervention is to develop functional and generalisable skills. Functional skills are those that most allow children to negotiate through their environment in ways that are satisfying and encourage independence. Generalisable skills are those that can be practiced and used in many different settings.” (Bricker and Cripe, 1992)  More than 2000 years ago Confucius observed, “I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.”  A naturalistic approach to language involves students in active physical participation. It offers support for students’ language, thinking and social development. As students develop physically and cognitively, and begin to explore their environment, they start to understand and use their growing language skills for an expanding range of purposes. (Love and Reilly, 2010)

== "Food for thought or something to talk about" so so much can be learnt in the garden. This is the guiding force behind the development of school gardens within the catholic education system in our local area. ==


 * __ Touch it, smell it, taste it, eat it. __**

**Letting Children Smell Healthy Foods Will Make them Like Them Better **
The smell of food is part of its flavor. If you want to teach children to like the taste of healthy food, you will need to give them lots of "lessons" in the taste of healthy food.One way to do this is to let them smell food. Smelling food is safe -- they don’t actually have to TRY it! It also gets them accustomed to the taste of healthy foods. If a child sniffs guavas a few times, they may find them less strange when they actually taste them.Children often need a dozen or more "lessons" in a food before they come to like it. Smelling is an easy and painless lesson. **Sniffing Healthy Food Makes Processed Food Seem Boring** Processed foods have very little flavor. They may taste salty, sweet, or fatty, but they don't have the fresh, strong flavors of real food. If you teach children to like the tastes of fresh food, they will shun the nasty, insipid tastes of processed foods. The artificial flavors, stale flour, and procesing chemicals will taste repulsive to them. **Sniffing Makes Food Fun** There are a few other advantages to letting your child smell food. First, it makes food into a fun, playful toy. Your mom may have told you not to play with your food, but playing with food is a wonderful way for children to overcome their misgivings about it. **Sniffing Makes Children Pay Attention to Food and Its Tastes** Playing the smell game also teaches your child to pay attention to his senses. Many people wolf down their meals without even really paying attention to them. Your goal is to create a young foodie out of your child -- he should love healthy, fresh, wonderful-tasting food, and dislike the bland, artificial flavors of processed food. Teaching him to pay attention to his senses of smell and taste will help him along in this goal. =__ Smell the doorway to taste? __= == Smell is like the “first sight” of food, the first thing you notice before even seeing a dish. And the better it is, the more you want to dig in as quickly as possible, the more likely you are to fall in love at first bite. In fact, you might already be in love before the first bite. How many times did you get home to the beautiful smell of a cake baking in the kitchen? ==

[|Sense What You Eat]

Food connects people sharing a meal together. All our senses become interconnected and alive when around food.
We see it. We go to a market and see all the colourful fruits and vegetables, we can pick the good or the bad by looking at them. We walk past a patisserie, see pastries and sweets at the window, they make us hungry. We share a meal with friends and can see them enjoying it. Nothing translates how good a meal is better than the look on a person’s face, because they’re usually too busy eating to do any talking. We hear it. We heat up oil in the pan and hear the crackling sound it starts to make and know it’s ready for more ingredients. We hear the knife hitting the cutting board as we’re chopping vegetables, or cutlery as it comes into contact with a plate. We can hear the different sounds resulting from cutting through different vegetables. And best of all, we can judge how good pastry is by the sound it makes when cutting through it. We smell it. As the onion starts cooking through in the oil in that pan, the aroma in the house always reminds me of my mom’s cooking. We smell some fruit before we buy it to judge its quality. We smell food to check if it’s gone bad. We smell coffee beans as they’re being ground. But more than anything I love it when the smell of whatever is baking in the oven invades the house and makes me hungrier than I already am. We touch it. We see fruits and vegetables but we still have to touch them to check how ripe they are. A cake or a pie just came out of the oven and is looking ready to be eaten, but we have to touch it to judge if it’s cooked. We go to a bakery to buy bread and we give it a little squeeze to judge how fresh it is. We taste it. We eat it and we savour every bite as our taste buds go on a different journey with every meal. It goes from savoury to sweet, dry to moist, mild to chilli. We can taste the different textures. And I always find amazing the food cravings of my taste buds. It’s a roller coaster of food that makes no sense, and is not intended to make sense. Chicken now, chocolate an hour later, cheese afterwards.