Due to income levels, television commercials, and lack of parental involvement many of my students are not even aware of what type of food they should be putting into their bodies. Add to that the confusion created by the media, fad diets, and ever-changing recommendations from experts (in the form of food pyramids) - how can anyone know what they should be putting in their body? I teach visual art at HSC in New Haven, Connecticut, where the only Health class is an elective, and no one is talking to students about their food choices. My students are from a variety of different geographic, socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. Due to these differences they enter my classroom with a variety of different experiences and varying knowledge of nutrition and art. I teach a course called Digital Art where students learn to use Photoshop. This is a medium that most students have not encountered before High School, so they all have fairly similar background knowledge no matter what art courses they have taken. My most successful units have involved giving students a "client" and challenging them to go through the same process a Graphic Designer would go through to pitch a design to a client. I would like to combine this strategy with important information about health, which is lacking in the rest of our curriculum.
The first thing I would like my students to do is to describe what foods they think constitute a healthy breakfast, lunch and dinner. We will discuss as a group where these ideas of healthy meals come from - parents, media, school, etc. Students will chart the food they consume for a week, especially paying attention to the food they consume during school hours. Students will compare different dietary guide graphics to determine who creates the graphics and how you can determine whether or not they are reliable. Students will then choose a guide to follow and create healthy school meals from that dietary guide. Their final project will be to create a tri-fold brochure aimed at convincing the Board of Education to invest in food service programs that bring more fresh, healthy foods into the cafeteria. The tri-fold brochure will contain three parts: an eye-catching print ad comparing the nutrition they currently receive with what they should be receiving, a section showing options and benefits for bringing in fresh, locally grown produce, and a section containing a recipe for a school lunch and breakfast using fresh produce.
Lesson Plan One: What Are My Options?
This curriculum unit will start with a project intended to make students more aware of their eating habits. Students will keep a food journal for an entire week. I will ask them to be extremely specific and honest in describing the foods they eat "during the school day" - breakfast, lunch and snacks. I am also curious about what they eat once at home, but I would like to discuss their food choices in two different categories: choices at school, and choices away from school. I am curious to see how these categories differ. I know that many of my students are responsible for feeding themselves and younger family members at home, since both parents are usually at work.
After we compile journals I will ask students to take some time to think about what influences their food choices. Do their parents do all of the food purchasing? Are they given money every week to buy their own food? Do they have a selection of choices at home? Does anyone in his or her family cook? Does what their friends eat influence them? What food options do they have at school? I will ask them to create a chart of different influences on their food choices, and then I will ask students to rank those choices into their top ten, with number one being the most influential. I have no idea what the results of this survey will be and am curious to have a discussion with the students about it.
Once we have discussed their current diet, I will ask students to hypothesize what they think a healthy daily diet looks like. I would like to know where their information for those assumptions comes from - to see how it correlates with their "top ten" sources. Once students have hypothesized about what they think a healthy diet looks like I will show them a variety of different "food pyramid" graphics. My objective in this exercise is to get students thinking about where reliable information comes from. If they read something in an article or see it on television, should they trust it? After all, our food pyramid and dietary guidelines in the United States have changed at least five times over the past one hundred years. I will ask them to consider: what are the reasons for these changes? I hope that they are thinking about things like: more information about how the body uses food, pressure from food companies, making the graphic easier to read, etc.
We will look at the history of the US food pyramid - why it was created, how it has changed over the years, what influences its creation, and what type of guidance it provides. I want to stress to them that the original food pyramid was created by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), which is an organization that was created not to promote health, but to support American food producers. I want to instill in students the need to check sources before believing information. We will decide as a class which food pyramid seems to be most appropriate for our school population.
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