Teaching Day-by-Day: Food Fitness

Week One - Heart Health
1. With your students, look up the meaning of fitness and wellness in a dictionary. How are these words the same and how are they different? Talk about what you, your students and their families do to maintain fitness and wellness.
2. Determine the role that sleep and water play in a person's heart and body health and talk with your students about this. For example, most children need 12 hours of sleep a night and adults need eight hours. Our bodies are 96% fluids – about six to eight cups of water a day keeps us healthy.
3. Use a search engine and type in The Healthy Refrigerator. Go to this site with your class and help them find and copy a recipe or two to take home and make with their families. Recipes are from the American Heart Association Kid's Cookbook.
4. Visit www.kidshealth.org with your students. Click on each of the areas at this site and read with your class so they can learn what healthy physical activity is and learn to "Exer-wise for a Healthy Heart!"


Week Two - Hygiene Hints

5. Look up hygiene in the dictionary or on the Internet. It originates from Greek mythology and comes from the name Hygeia, who was the goddess of health. Make a list of healthy habits your students practice. Keep adding to this list and revisit it at the end of the month.
6. Type Good Grooming for Kids into a search engine and click on this website. You and your students can take a guided "good grooming" tour with Bert and Ernie that includes Q & A's about skin, hair, nails, teeth, eyes and ears. Check out the other websites that are displayed as well.
7. Brainstorm a list of questions your class has about the human body. Then read, Why Don't Haircuts Hurt? Questions and Answers About the Human Body (Scholastic, 1999) to your students. Which questions were not answered? Form small groups of students to find these answers.
8. Visit www.niehs.nih.gov and sing along with "Do Your Ears Hang Low?" and "If You're Happy and You Know It." Help your class change the lyrics to one of these songs to include good hygiene habits. Practice this song and sing it to another class.
9. Do action research with your students as researchers by helping them interview families and friends about hand-washing practices. Discuss the cold-fighting and bacteria-reducing effects of regular hand washing with soap and warm water and instant hand sanitizers.
10. Check out www.toothfairy.org where you can help your students understand the saying, "Be true to your teeth or they'll be false to you!" Also, discover the origin of the "tooth fairy," tips for flossing and links to other informative dental sites on the Internet.
11. Invite your school nurse to come to your classroom and talk to students about eye care. Schedule vision screenings for students who rub their eyes, have red or watery eyes, skip lines when reading orally, squint or read with their head tilted to one side.


Week Three - Diet Delights

12. Play "Word Tag" with your class to build their food vocabulary. Begin by naming a food like yogurt. Have a student continue by naming a food that begins with the last letter of yogurt. He or she might say turkey and the next student says a food that begins with "y."
13. Go to www.kidshealth.org on the web with your class where you can read articles and work on inter active health-related activities. Click on "Staying Healthy" to learn about kids' dieting, food labels, the food pyramid, snacking and much more.
14. Have each student bring an empty box of his or her favorite cereal to school. Analyze the ingredients in each. Make a chart to show comparisons and let each student enter his or her own data. Ingredients are listed in order of the amount present in a food. Note the amount of sugar!
15. Collect nutritional booklets/posters from your students' favorite fast food restaurants. Have students compare saturated fats, sodium and calories in their favorite meals. Transcribe their observations onto chart paper and summarize findings together.
16. Ask students to keep a week's written log of all the foods (and how much) they eat. Then have them compare each day's food intake to the food pyramid to see whether or not they're eating balanced diets.
17. Ask for volunteers to interview your cafeteria manager to find out how the lunch menu is created. Have your class brainstorm questions to ask. Where does the food come from? Who decides if the meals are balanced? Is a special menu available for students with food allergies?
18. Help students create a survey about food including questions about favorite dishes, beverages, vegetables, fruits, desserts, etc. Duplicate the questions and have students survey their friends and tally results to share with the class and cafeteria manager.


Week Four - Spectacular Sports

19. Make a list with your class of sports they play and/or can think of that keep people healthy. Leave the list up in your classroom so students can add to it this week. Have them look up the word cardiovascular and put a check beside each sport that includes cardio activity.
20. Ask the Physical Education teacher to teach your class to square dance and line dance. Sports are "recreational and competitive activities that involve physical strength or skill." Have your students decide whether or not dancing is a sport. Don't forget to dance while figuring this out!
21. With your students, make a list of the different kinds of footwear that are available for different sports. Have them draw pictures of various kinds of footwear and label each. Post pictures outside your classroom with a sign reading, These Shoes are Made for Fitness.
22. Ask your PTA or PTO and Physical Education teacher to help your class organize a Walk-a-Thon for a good cause at the school track. Help students obtain pledges and prepare them for walking.
23. Click on "Sports" at www.yahooligans.com to view sports pictures and videos with your students. At this site, they can learn about and view pictures of all kinds of sports including snowboarding, baton twirling, fencing, scuba diving and rugby.
24. Invite two athletes (a male and a female) from your high school to talk to your class about the sport they love, how they got "hooked," how they work out and how they balance sports and school. Brainstorm questions with your students beforehand.
25. Have students write acrostic poems about their favorite sport by writing the sport vertically down the left side of a piece of paper and inserting the words to describe the sport horizontally. Have students illustrate and hang them for display.


Week Five - Cautions and Concerns

26. In your next parent newsletter, include the site www.wiredkids.org. It's a site that educates parents and kids about alcohol and drug-related websites and promotes online safety for kids.
27. Visit www.kidshealth.org with your class. Click on Watch Out! and go to Smoking Stinks! to read a brief article on why smoking is bad for the heart, lungs and body.
28. Invite a nurse or doctor to visit your class to talk about the effects of smoking and show pictures of healthy lung tissue and a smoker's lung tissue.
29. Have your students make Stay Healthy & Fit collage posters using every day labels, objects and artwork to show the do's and don'ts of fitness and heart-body-mind healthy living. Post them around the school and in the local library, doctors' offices and grocery stores.
30. Ask for volunteers to use what they've learned this month to write a play about fitness and health. Suggest that everyone in the class should have a part to play and practice a few times before performing for another class.
31. Revisit the list of healthy habits your students created at the beginning of the month. Revise and add any new habits they learned about and acquired this month. Review the list each month for the rest of the year for fitter, happier and healthier students!

Karen Bromley is a Professor of Literacy in the School of Education and Human Development at Binghamton University in Binghamton, NY where she teaches graduate courses in literacy, language arts and children's literature.

October 2003, Vol.34, No.2