A few people in the class, including Liudmila, Tara, Julie, Nurit, and Cris, have been blogging about food and nutrition-related issues. Lots of folks have pointed to the increase in sedentary activities for kids, such as watching tv and playing video games, as part of what is responsible for the rise in childhood obesity. However, some have seen the power of technology for addressing the epidemic among children, as in this intervention,via eSchool News.
Jill Bond, a teacher at Morningside Elementary School in Port St. Lucie, Fla., uses food nutrition education to teach her fourth grade students core curriculum subjects such as math, science, and language arts.
"It's amazing how little these children knew about nutrition," Bond said. With resources gleaned from textbooks, the internet, and Discovery Education's Health Connection, she taught her students math, science, reading, writing, and about food groups, carbohydrates, fats, and more.
For a lesson on grains, she had her students grind whole grains, such as popcorn, wheat berries, and groats, into cornmeal, flour, and oatmeal. Students also kept journals of what grains they ate that week, and they watched a video from Discovery Education Health Connection about how different cultures eat different grains.
Although showing video to students might seem counter-productive, Bond said it engages her students more quickly than she otherwise could.
"Children 'so' need the entertainment, so it's nice to have the multimedia tie-in," Bond said. "These kids are so multimedia-entwined since birth. They've been raised with big-screen TVs, and some of them can text message faster than I can type."
The videos offered by Discovery Education are arranged in short segments. The videos Bond shows are only minutes long, but still, she will pause them to ask questions or to get students to anticipate what is coming up next.
Discovery Education Health Connection is a full health and prevention curriculum program available online. Its content covers nine areas: alcohol and other drugs; the body; growth and development; mental health; nutrition; physical activity; safety; tobacco; and violence."
It's also worth noting that the Wikipedia entry for Childhood Obesity is a stub, maybe some of you will consider contributing to it and expanding it.
1 comment:
This is very inspiring. I think if kids are taught about nutrition at any early age it definitely affects their choices growing up. The is all dependent of course on the fact that healthy food is accessible.
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