Students’ age range: 10-12
Topic: Your Diet and Your Health
Description: Teacher will provide blank chart, scissors, glue, paper plates, rulers and magazines e.g. Good Housekeeping to students working in groups of two. Students will be collecting pictures of food items, classifying them into their food groups on a chart and also using some of the pictures to “prepare” a balanced meal on a paper plate. They will display their meals and explain why they believe their meal is balanced. The whole group will assess and critique each other’s meals. Teacher will circulate, observe classification of foods and listen to critique of meals by students.
Teacher will show a video/PowerPoint presentation of children and/or adults suffering from the effects of unbalanced diets, e.g. diets lacking in vitamins, (scurvy, rickets), protein (beriberi), carbohydrates (malnutrition), obesity, diabetes. Pause during presentation after each disease and discuss the consequences of not having a balanced diet in each case. Students will be asked how they feel about what they are seeing and discuss how they should treat persons who are affected by food-related illnesses. They should also be asked about their own food choices and discuss what changes they think they can make to their own choices at school and at home. Students will make a journal entry about how they feel about the presentation they have viewed and justify the need for eating healthy foods.
Teacher then places students in four groups of 3 and explain that they will use internet or other sources to research the following: Group 1 – obesity; Group 2 – malnutrition: Group 3 – Diabetes. Among themselves they will select one person each to present on (a) the causes of the disease (b) the prevention of the disease and (c) data about the number of persons suffering from the condition in Jamaica and/or the Caribbean. Group 4 will use internet or other sources to research the Ministry of Health promotions – “Jamaica Moves” and Sugar Free, and the public reaction to it (newspaper articles,cartoons, etc). They will be given one week to research and collect the information using tablets / computers at school, meet with group members and put their findings together. Explain to students that presentation will take the form of a Fish Bowl in which each student will present their assigned topic and field questions from classmates about their presentation.
On the day of presentation, rearrange classroom in a Fish Bowl. State or post rules – only one person should speak at a time; be respectful; hold questions until the end of each group presentation at which time they can be fielded. Seat students to present in the inner circle - causes, data and prevention for each disease, with audience in the outer circle. Group four will present on the promotions. At the end of the presentations, students will highlight what they have learned in a whole group discussion. They will make journal entries on what changes they will make to their own diets, and what changes they will encourage their parents to make. In light of the presentation, teacher will question students about the meals offered in the school canteen, and students will evaluate if there are any changes to be made. Finally they will write letters to the principal stating what they believe about the canteen’s offerings and how the food offered their affects their health - positively or negatively.