Design Technology: Healthy Wraps!

This week, we became chefs and food critics, all-in-one!

To begin our Design and Technology topic, we read a brief that told us that children can often choose less healthy snacks and meals, and that meals are often not balanced. We were asked to design a healthy wrap that includes fresh ingredients from these food groups: protein, fruits or vegetables and dairy.

We then re-visited our learning in science and spoke about a healthy, balanced meal. We discussed food groups such as proteins, carbohydrates (which we knew would be our wrap within our design), fruits and vegetables, and dairy.

After this, we considered three of our own designs that we would like to make. We had to use one protein, one dairy product and a fruit or vegetable to go within our wrap. Some of us thought that steak might be nice, or chicken! We had so many fruits and veg to choose from! Cucumber seems to be a favourite, along with sweetcorn and lettuce. We went round the class and voted for our favourite ideas, which was then taken into consideration by our teacher and we were able to vote on any adjustments.

In groups, we then had the chance to work together to make different wraps that would then be cut into 6 pieces so that everyone could try different flavour combinations. We’ll come back to that soon, once we wrap our heads around the making process. We worked in four different groups, which each had different ingredients to combine within our wraps. We had chicken, pepper and sour cream. Hummus, cheese, cucumber and lettuce. Tuna, mayonnaise, cheese and cucumber. Finally, we had chicken, cheese and cucumber. We practiced our cutting skills and also had to consider the amounts of each ingredient to include so that we didn’t overload our wrap. We needed the flavour combinations to be perfect! Once we had all completed our wonderful wraps, we carefully cut them into six equal pieces so that we could complete our taste-test. This part, along with wrapping, was actually quite tricky!

Before we went to the Creativity Room to make our wraps, we looked at how we would be evaluating our work. We had to consider:

If the wrap met the design brief – was it a healthy wrap?
It’s smell
The taste!
We then tried our creations! We then marked the wrap out of 5, with 1 being not particularly palatable or enjoyable and 5 being absolutely delicious. Lots of us really impressed our teachers with how brave we were with trying new foods, or foods that might not always be our favourites. Some of us were slightly less keen to try new foods. However, you will still see from our pictures, we had lots of happy children in our class this afternoon! In this activity, we realised during our discussion and evaluation that we all have different foods that we enjoy. We all like different textures and flavours so it would be extremely hard to choose just one healthy wrap for all of the children across the country.

We really loved this opportunity to link and connect our knowledge and understanding of science to a Design and Technology activity. We would like to say a big thank you to Ms O’Neill and Miss Hector for helping us to make our wraps, and also for tidying up after us. You would not believe the mess that we managed to make!

Anyway, that’s a wrap!