Classroom lesson · Kiwifruit · 🇳🇿 New Zealand

Kiwifruit

A fuzzy brown fruit named after a fuzzy brown bird

What is it?

Kiwifruit are small, fuzzy, brown fruits with bright green (or sometimes golden) flesh inside, dotted with tiny black seeds. They're named after the kiwi - New Zealand's national bird - because the fruit's brown skin looks a bit like the bird's feathers.

Tell me more

Kiwifruit didn't start in New Zealand. The plant originally grew in China, where it was called 'yang tao' or sometimes 'Chinese gooseberry'. In 1904 a school teacher from New Zealand brought some seeds back from a trip, and the plant turned out to love the New Zealand climate.

For years it was sold around the world as the 'Chinese gooseberry', but the name confused people - it isn't a gooseberry, and most shoppers didn't know what it was. In the 1950s a New Zealand fruit company renamed it 'kiwifruit' after the country's famous bird. The new name stuck.

Today, New Zealand is one of the biggest kiwifruit growers in the world. The vines are grown in long rows, tied up to wires so the fruit hangs down like green eggs. Each vine can produce thousands of fruit a year.

Slice a kiwifruit in half and you can see why some people call them 'the prettiest fruit': a circle of black seeds in a ring of pale green, like a tiny green sun. They are also extremely good for you - one kiwifruit has more vitamin C than an orange.

In the classroom

Walk your class through this in 15 minutes.

Talk together

Discussion prompts

01What other foods can you think of that are named after an animal or a place?
02Why might it matter what a food is called when it's being sold around the world?
03Kiwifruit travelled from China to New Zealand, then back out to the rest of the world. What other foods do you eat that started somewhere far away?

Try this

Classroom activity

If you can, bring a kiwifruit into class. Slice one in half and look closely - count the seeds, look at the pattern. Then design and name a new fruit of your own. What does it look like? Where does it grow? What would you call it?

More about New Zealand

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