During the last two weeks, Class 3 have been learning lots about Fairtrade.
We began by looking at the humble banana, a favourite fruit for many of us. Some of us did not know that the farmers who worked really hard to grow the bananas didn’t always get a fair price and struggled to feed their families. We talked about how unfair this was and how people around the world, including us, are trying to change that.
To demonstrate how unfair it can be to live and farm in other parts of the world, we played a game. We were split up into 4 teams, 2 teams were given dry spaghetti, scissors and a ruler; the other teams had only cooked egg noodles and no other equipment. To begin with, we all had to make 10cm lengths of our product, but halfway through Mrs Hume rang a bell and said that now the egg noodle team had to make 20cm lengths and that their previous work didn’t count. Some of us thought this was really unfair, even when we were on the winning team. Others laughed and were just glad that they were going to win.
At the end we talked about how unfair this had been and related to the farmers who make bananas. a child said, “It’s shocking that they don’t get all of the money when they do the work!” Another child agreed and felt the whole thing was, “unfair”. Both children understood why Fairtrade and the work that they do is so important.
