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| My
class really enjoyed learning about nutrition this year. I introduced the
topic by listening to the book and the tape of "Shiny Bright". It is a
story about a little girl who shines because she eats the right kinds of
foods. The villains Ms. Grease, Sir Salty, and King Sugar get into
her cupboards and tempt her into eating foods that are not good for her...
as a consequence, she loses her shine. The story is about how Shiny learns
to balance healthy and non- healthy foods into her diet.
At this time I introduce the food group posters and we talk about which kinds of foods belong in each category. At snack time we talk about who is eating foods from each group and the foods that don't fit into a category, we call the "extra" foods. We took a class field trip to Safeway, and as we toured, made our focus looking for food groups within the store. Safeway very generously gave us foods from every food group for us to take home, and we had a great snack when we got back to the school. That week in the classroom we set up a "Safeway store". We put the food group posters up around our "store" and the children went around with shopping baskets and put play food and food boxes brought from home into the appropriate departments. When all of the foods had been organized we gathered all of the food and began again. It was a favorite centre! As a follow-up activity I hot glued a paper plate a knife and a fork onto a colored piece of construction paper (to resemble a placemat). I asked the children to choose to make a breakfast, lunch, or supper that included at least one item from each food group. It made a great bulletin board display and was a useful tool in evaluating weather or not the children understood the concept of food groups. |