If you're looking for fresh ideas to squeeze into your classroom nutrition lessons, you'll find a feast of ideas on the Internet!
Be sure to check out the Additional Sites at the end of the article. They include everything from cooking ideas for raising your students' awareness of hunger in your community and around the world.
A great place to begin is the Dole 5 A Day site. Feast away on a cornucopia of Classroom Resources. Another cool feature on this site is a free kit for teachers who want to produce 5 A Day Live, a musical play that delivers the 5 A Day message. The kit contains scripts, costume- and scenery-making directions, and an audiotape of the lyrics for the play, which is staged in a TV studio and focuses on an evening news broadcast by student reporters. Plenty of other nutrition-related materials are offered, including a 5 A Day chart for kids to hang on their refrigerators
Dole also provides great stuff for students! Don't miss the Fruit and Vegetable Encyclopedia, where students can have fun learning the nutrition facts about more than 75 fruits and vegetables.
Finally, if you're looking for teaching materials on a specific fruit or vegetable, I recommend that you use your favorite search engine to search for sites. (If students are doing the search, they should start with a kid-friendly search engine such as YahooKids.) You'll find sites related to just about every fruit and vegetable imaginable. Many of those sites are loaded with teaching materials.
ADDITIONAL SITES
Serve Up Classroom Nutrition Activities
This week's Education World LESSON PLANNING story includes a couple dozen nutrition-related activities for teachers to use.
Read It Before You Eat It!
At this Web page from KidSource, popular children's book character Curious George introduces students to the nutrition label on food products. Kids can study the label on a box of Banana Munchie Crunchies cereal and play an unscramble-the-nutrients game.
The Food Guide Pyramid
This site from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) examines the food pyramid section by section.
Pin the Foods on the Pyramid
Scroll to page 4 of this newsletter for some excellent ideas for classroom activities or a school-wide nutrition fair.
Smart-Mouth.org
The Just for Kids page of the Center for Science in the Public Interest's (CSPI) Web site offers healthful recipes and nutrition facts for kids ages 7 to 12. Includes recipes for banana split cereal, blueberry pancakes, muffin pizzas, and fabulous fish sticks.
Kids' Heart-Healthy Recipes
Recipes from the American Heart Association's Kids' Cookbook including Shake-It-Up Chicken Nuggets, Slumber Party French Toast, and Top Hat Pizza.
Teaching Media
This page is packed with links to materials that help teachers teach about advertising (the language, the gimmicks, and more) as it relates to health and nutrition. Links to teaching units, lessons, activities, and other resources.
Kids Can Make a Difference
"Inspiring kids to end hunger and poverty in their communities, their country, and their world" is the tagline for this site. The site includes hunger facts, ideas for kid-centered hunger projects, and a peek at a teacher's guide, Finding Solutions to Hunger: Kids Can Make a Difference. A quiz taken from the guide is an excellent resource for opening kids' eyes to the problem of hunger.
Nutrition for Kids
"Where getting kids to eat right has never 'bean' this much fun!" Nutritionist Connie Evers, author of How to Teach Nutrition to Kids, has produced this Web site. The site includes Feeding Kids, a free online newsletter that includes nutrition tips for teachers, parents, and children. The site includes "This Week's Carrot," a tip that teachers might include in their newsletters to parents (or share directly with their students).
