Teaching children the importance of healthy foods gives them the information and the tools they need to make good choices throughout their lives. Creating a lesson plan allows you to provide your students with vital information in a way that facilitates learning at all ages. Following a healthy meal plan protects children from developing health conditions that include diabetes, weight gain and heart disease. Nutritious foods protect children from these problems and prevent cancer. Schools have a responsibility to prepare children to live a healthy and productive life and teaching them about good eating is a part of this.
Step 1
Make the lesson age-appropriate. Preschool students are not able to comprehend material at the same level that high schools students can. This makes it important to teach the material in a way that is geared toward the learning style of your students. Younger children do well with games and coloring activities while older students are able to use computer software and books to learn.
Step 2
Introduce the Food Guide Pyramid. When teaching about healthy foods, the Food Guide Pyramid offers a jumping off point by allowing children to understand what makes a food healthy and how much of each is needed to support good health. Books, worksheets, computer games and healthy food collages are options when teaching this topic.
Step 3
Talk about vitamins and minerals that healthy foods contain. Understanding the ways that healthy foods keep children healthy helps them learn why it is so important to eat them. A good way to helping children learn which nutrients are in which foods is to use flash cards or matching games. If you teach older students, allow them to each choose a different nutrient, research it and present the information to the class. This way, every child is learning about all the nutrients.
Step 4
Teach students to read and compare food labels. This will need to be basic for young children, but middle and high school students can get more in-depth. Show children how to determine how many calories are in an entire package based on the number of servings it contains. Show them how to find out the cholesterol, salt, sugar, vitamin and mineral content. Teach them how to determine whether a food is healthy based on this information and how to compare two foods to see which one is a healthier choice.
Tips and Warnings
- If you are a parent, implement these ideas at home to reinforce the message that healthy foods are important.
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