Healthy Living Projects

This month was extremely busy.  We were preparing for our speech contest and participating in Student Vote for the BC provincial election, so we did not get our Family Challenge completed yet, but we are working on it.

We spent a good part of the month of April learning about nutrition in foods and drinks.  Using the HeartSmart resource, students learned about balanced diets, how to read nutrition labels, and why we should monitor the sodium and fats in our diet.  To apply this to our own lives, students examined nutrition labels of foods that their family eats and analyzed them for sodium, calories, and fat content.

Students then learned about why we should limit sugar and caffeine in our diets.  We examined common drinks from our lunches and compared their contents.  We discussed the difference between added sugar and natural sugars.  Once we completed this investigation, students then created posters to teach the rest of the school about how much sugar is in our lunch drinks.  They measured out the grams of sugar to display on their posters and then prepared oral presentations to share with each class in the school.  Feedback from other teachers indicated that the students did a great job sharing what they had learned and answering questions from the classes.  The posters generated a lot of interest from other students in the school.

This investigation sparked a lot of questions from my students as they wondered what the sugar, caloric, and caffeine content is in other drinks that they enjoy.  They then applied the same scientific process to examine the nutritional content of other food/drinks.  Each student developed their own question and located nutritional information from the internet to compare the foods they chose.  Some interesting food categories were:
Fast Food Burgers
Sports Drinks
School Snacks
Tim Horton's Snacks
Pizza

Students were very excited to plan a meal or physical activity for their family, although some expressed concern that they would not be able to get the whole family together at one time.  This made the challenge even more important for us.  I encouraged the students to talk to their parents and they were pleasantly surprised with the support they received.  We are still working on documenting their plans and will share some when they are finished.