Recognizing Soil as the Source

Procedures

1. Pose the question to students, “What is the difference between dirt, mud, and soil?”. Discuss how dirt and mud are often referred to as a nuisance (“Don’t get dirty! Don’t track mud into the house!”) but how soil is a nutrient-rich valuable resource that grows all of our food.
2. Ask one student what they had for breakfast then demonstrate how everything they ate originally came from a plant and from the soil.Here are some examples:Vegetables → grown in soilFruits → grown in soil
   Bread → made from grain → grown in soil
   Eggs → came from chickens → that ate plants → grown in soil
   Milk → came from cows → that ate grass → grown in soil
   Honey → made by bees, from nectar collected from flowers → grown in soil
   Meat → came from an animal (that may have eaten another animal but eventually) → that animal ate plants → grown in soil
3. Challenge students to (in their journals) draw something that they ate for lunch and draw the chain back to the soil.