Below is the summary of internet resources that we have used in our lesson plan for a week. The internet resource for the teacher is the only site that wasn’t expressly used within the week plan.
Student
1) Smash-Your-Food is an online game that asks kids to make predictions on how much sugar, salt, and oil are in common (junk) foods. After making a prediction, a lever is pulled and the food is smashed! As in real videos of hamburgers, french fries, cans of soda, and bowls of ice cream being smashed into a machine. Then the machine (this part is not literal) extracts the salt, sugar and oil into separate quantities to show kids how close (or far off) their predictions were. Next to their predictions and the actual amounts are the recommended amounts per day.
This activity gives kids and entry-level ability to conceptualize how much sugar, salt, and oil are in their foods. As a way to question, “I wonder how much unhealthy stuff is in this”?
2) MyPlate Blastoff is also an online game, but this game focuses on the amount of and variety of nutrients that you need to fuel yourself. This game uses the myPlate nutrition guidelines to have kids plan a day’s worth of meals and physical activities so that their astronaut is fully fueled and ready to take off into space. If students are unable to plan a well-rounded menu of meals and physical activities the game will explicitly state where their plans didn’t meet the myPlate recommendations. This helps students to understand that they don’t just need “healthy” foods and exercise, but they need a variety of nutrients and physical activity.
Teacher
EatSmart.org is a site for teachers, as it offers $25 of FREE nutritional materials. The materials are based-off of the myPlate guidelines, so it will align well with HBOs. The site offers physical activity games, classroom nutrition lessons and the materials needed to work along with them, posters, handouts for parents, and a really cool beach ball nutrition activity. The site is run and funded by the Washington State Dairy Council so there is a lot of dairy propaganda, including a handout on why “flavored milks” are great for you. But as long as the Dairy Council bias is accounted for, the materials are great. Bonus tip: the site doesn’t check if multiple emails are used for one shipping address.
Parent
USDA Food Composition Databases is a site that shows the nutritional content labels of raw and packaged foods. It’s basically an online nutritional label database. The site is fairly easy to search and it provides parents with the ability to look up what’s so great or not so great in the foods their families are eating. This site could be sent home to parents with a teach-a-topic lesson about nutrition. So, students would teach their parents how to use the site and look at the nutritional components of a simple vegetarian sushi roll. From there parents can decide if they want to keep using this resource.