Veggy Tables

A Harvest Celebration Assembly

The following outline should give you all you need to prepare a harvest celebration assembly. Please, however, feel free to adapt this to suit your school. Specifically, you may wish to add songs, readings and poems that help to illustrate the theme. As schools often have their ‘favourites’ for these, we have not made suggestions, but if you need ideas, please contact Harvest Help

1. Introduction

Ask a group of children or a class to prepare a presentation describing their favourite foods. Explain to the children that Harvest is a time when we say thank you for all the good food we have from the earth. This harvest, we will be remembering those who do not always have enough to eat.

Ask the children what would be on the menu if they could decide on the food for school dinners every day. Get some suggestions. A class or group could prepare in advance and present a balanced menu for school dinners (use ‘Healthy School Initiative’ materials). Use the differences between the answers and the presentation to illustrate to the children that we have huge choice in what we eat. We can choose to be healthy or unhealthy, eat a lot or a little, but whatever we decide, we have choices and know there will always be food for us.

An older group of children can use the material on the attached sheet ‘Food in southern Africa’ to describe the normal diet for many African children. Ask the assembly for their reaction to this diet and how it is different to theirs.

Explain that most children in Africa eat very differently to us. They have less choice and often do not have enough food to eat, which means that they sometimes eat only one or two meals a day. Children quite often go hungry and this means they are less able to resist diseases when they come. Nearly one in five children in Africa dies before they reach five years old.

Ask a group of children to explain what you plan to do, as a school, to help to change the situation in Africa. Describe the fundraising you have done and the difference it will make. Use the accompanying letter, the following section the fundraising ideas sheet and the Harvest Help web site.

Your donations will be used to help farmers and their families to grow more and different food, particularly vegetables. It costs just £20 to give a family seeds and training to start to grow a new crop and £50 for a whole vegetable plot. Because the seeds are lent, each year, families repay the loan and these seeds are passed on in turn to other families. So the gift will multiply year after year. When you know how much you have raised, ask the children to work out how many families they will have helped after, one year, two years etc.

For example, based on your school raising £220: After one year this would help 11 families, after 2 years 22, after three years 44 etc. On average there are 6 people per family in southern Africa. As a tables challenge, ask the school to work out how many people altogether they will have helped after 5 years (in the case of £220 it is 1,056). NB, seeds have to be replaced after about 5 years.