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Grade Level: 5
Subject(s): Science, Mathematics, Health
Topics: Nutrition, Health, Consumer Awareness, Persuasion, Business
Higher-Order Thinking Skills: Analysis, Evaluation
Key Learnings: Importance of Diet, Persuasive Writing, Planning Healthy Meals, Interpreting Food Labels
Time Needed: 4 weeks, 5 hours per week
Background: South Carolina, United States |
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Unit Summary
Students study their own health, activity, and nutrition needs as they develop menus of healthy and appealing foods for their own restaurants. Students develop consumer awareness by evaluating the persuasive elements of television and print advertising, and write and present their own convincing commercials to encourage people to visit their restaurants. As a culminating activity, the restaurants open, and students pretend to take orders, figure bills, compute 15 percent tips, and count back change.
Curriculum-Framing Questions
- Essential Question
How can I stay healthy?
- Unit Questions
How do my eating habits affect my health and growth?
How do I plan a healthy, nutritious diet?
What factors influence my food choices?
- Content Questions
What is the food pyramid?
What is the right number of calories for me?
How do I analyze and represent data?
Assessment Processes
View how a variety of student-centered assessments are used in the Food for Thought Unit Plan. These assessments help students and teachers set goals; monitor student progress; provide feedback; assess thinking, processes, performances, and products; and reflect on learning throughout the learning cycle. Instructional Procedures
Getting Started
(Note: The nutrition notes sheet summarizes many of the concepts addressed in this unit. The information is presented as background for teachers, but you may want to make copies for students as well.)
Begin this study of health and nutrition by asking students, "If, as the saying goes, 'You are what you eat,' does that make me a cheeseburger? What does that phrase mean? Is it true? In what ways?" Promote a discussion about nutrition, and record prior knowledge, interesting ideas, questions that arise, and possible avenues for answering questions. Introduce the Unit Question, How do my eating habits affect my health and growth? and discuss briefly.
Before moving forward, pass out a nutrition learning log and a learning log rubric to each student. Explain to students that they will be writing in their learning logs throughout the unit to reflect on questions, record information, and document their thinking. The learning logs are an important part of the unit and assessed at the end of the unit. Therefore, the learning log rubric outlines expectations and guidelines for students to refer to while they write entries in their learning logs. Review the rubric with students and consider drafting an entry with them as an exemplary example.
Next, direct students to answer the Unit Question, What factors influence my food choices? in their learning logs. When writing is finished, ask students to voice their ideas, and cluster the ideas under logical categories. Some answers may include reasons such as hunger, taste, visual appeal, health, convenience, habit, novelty, cultural tradition, cost, and advertising.
Homework Assignment: Ask students to bring in a few nutrition charts from food packages that they may have at home. These will be used later during the “Planning a Healthy Diet” section of this unit.
Nutrition Basics
(Note: See the nutrition notes before proceeding.)
Introduce the five food groups and the food pyramid. Lead a discussion to answer the Unit Question, How do I plan a healthy, nutritious diet? and the question, Why is eating the recommended servings from each food group everyday as well as eating a wide variety of foods from each food group important?
Have students draw the food pyramid in their nutrition learning logs, labeled with the recommended number of servings for each food group. Through a film, or aided with charts or diagrams, address the nutritional value of each of the food groups. Explain portions and how to count composite foods, like sandwiches, which may account for one meat serving, two bread servings, one vegetable serving, and one fat/other serving.
Help familiarize students with the five food groups by having them create large food group posters that can be posted around the classroom. Create a bulletin board area that displays in big letters the following labels:
- Milk/Dairy
- Meat
- Vegetables
- Fruit
- Grains
- Others
Have students cut out pictures of food from magazines, circulars, and newspapers and glue them to the appropriate banner.
For the next five days, have students keep a food diary of everything they eat and drink. Include a weekend day to see if eating habits are different from the rest of the week. At the end of the five days, have students use the daily food diary spreadsheet template to record the total number of servings they ate from each food group. They can then find the daily average of servings from each group (the spreadsheet will calculate this for them), create a daily average graph (see the sample food diary), and compare it to the recommended number of servings. Lead a discussion with students about the outcomes of poor nutrition.
Food Is Fuel
Introduce the concept of food as fuel and the term calorie (see the nutrition notes). Show students how to find their ideal daily calorie levels as recommended in the nutrition notes calories chart. Ask students to reflect on one day's diet from their food diaries. (They have been recording this information!) Instruct students to use an Internet Calorie Calculator* to find and record the total number of calories in the day's diet, and then answer the following questions:
- What is the right number of calories for me? (Content Question)
- Do I eat the proper number of calories, too few, or too many?
- How can my diet be altered so I consume the right amount of calories?
- How can my activity level be altered?
Homework Assignment: Reflect on the day and estimate how many minutes were spent engaged in different activities during waking hours. Record the activities in the learning log. Activities might include sitting in class, sports practice, watching television, walking to school, PE class, and doing specific chores.
Activity Fueled by Food
Discuss the activity log homework assignment. Have students pose questions for the group, such as:
- What was the most common activity?
- What was the most strenuous activity recorded?
- Who expended the most energy?
- How many hours did the whole class spend in front of the television?
Using the Calories Burned Calculator*, teach students to calculate how many calories their specific activities burned. Create a large classroom chart that shows common activities and the calories they require. Have students create miniature versions of the chart in their learning logs.
Making Choices
Discuss food choices and the impact of small changes in diet over time. For instance, a person can choose to have a glass of milk or a can of soda with lunch—How do these drinks compare nutritionally? Have students choose two foods, research their nutritional value (using print or electronic sources), and compare them. Provide students with the making choices instructions to guide them through using spreadsheet software when creating their nutritional food label graphs. Students may practice interpreting each other's graphs and record their interpretations in their nutrition learning logs.
Planning a Healthy Diet
Revisit the Unit Question, How do I plan a healthy, nutritious diet? Have a brief discussion to share ideas. Using the food group banners, food pyramid diagram, nutrition charts from packaged food labels, and cookbooks as resources, students plan a day's menu that meets nutritional requirements and stays under 30 percent fat. Discuss with students the Essential Question, How can I stay healthy? Make sure students understand that eating a nutritional diet of the correct calories is a good way to achieve and maintain good health.
Advertising and Food Choice
Revisit the Unit Question, What factors influence my food choices? In preparation for creating their own persuasive food commercials and slideshows for their restaurants, teach students to evaluate the persuasive elements of Saturday morning television advertising. Discuss the features of commercials (targeted audience, hook, message, sound and visual appeal, and descriptive words) that draw us in, causing us to want the products being advertised. Practice observation techniques in class before students try this at home. In advance, tape children's programming on Saturday morning between 7:00 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. Cue up a food commercial. Using a chart or overhead transparency of a TV ad observation form, run the videotape and demonstrate how to record information about the advertisement. Pass out the observation form and have pairs of students record information from another food commercial. Assign this activity as homework for a Saturday morning. Ask students to write a summary of their information and be ready to report back to the class the following Monday. When lessons resume, discuss the assignment, and help students identify general themes in advertising.
Restaurateurs
Set students to work in small groups to create their own restaurant menus and advertising campaigns. Give them the scoring guide when the requirements are given and encourage them to self-assess their work. Each menu should include:
- Restaurant name
- Tagline or slogan for the restaurant
- Restaurant description
- Menu items with a description of nutritional values
- Address, phone number, and hours of operation
- Digital pictures, graphics, or scanned artwork
As an extension activity, have students compare caloric and nutritional values of their menus to menus from a Fast-Food Restaurant* they have visited. Challenge kids to find the worst and best food item in each restaurant (a worst example would be Burger King’s* Double Whopper with cheese—932 calories, 54 grams of fat).
Persuasive Commercial—Student Presentation
To promote their restaurants, have each group create a convincing slideshow commercial or video commercial to encourage people to visit their restaurants. The commercials should reflect the advertising tactics they learned about during the Saturday morning commercial observation activity. Each commercial should include the following components:
- Name and slogan of the restaurant
- Restaurant description
- Address, phone number, and hours of operating
- Reasons why people should visit the restaurant
- Examples of the healthy items on the menu
Hand out the commercial checklist for students to follow as they create their commercials. Have students develop storyboard plans of their commercials before they work in the computer lab or film their videos. Photocopy menus and show commercials to the class, and discuss the appeal and nutrition of the restaurants.
Culminating Activity—Restaurant Opening Night
"Open" one or two restaurants each day, with restaurant groups serving their classmate customers. Have restaurateurs explain their healthy offerings, pretend to take orders, figure a bill, compute a 15 percent tip, and count back change. Buddy classes, specialists, and the principal might enjoy "dining" at the "restaurants," too.
Revisit the Essential Question, How can I stay healthy? Have students record in their logs what they learned in this unit to help them stay healthy and respond to one of the following summative prompts:
- You go out to breakfast with friends. Wanting to eat in a healthy way, what do you order and why?
- What kinds of foods would you choose for healthy snacks? How are these foods different from those that fit in the "Others" category?
- Your family goes to a fast-food restaurant for dinner. Wanting to eat in a healthy way, how do you choose what to order?
- Have your eating habits changed? How?
- What influences your food choices? How do you deal with these influences?
Other Food Topics
Throughout the unit, lessons should be presented about food and nutrition. Lessons and activities might include:
- How food moves from producer to consumer
- Politics of food
- Price of food—What fraction of a family's dollar goes for food? How does this compare to 50 years ago?
- Food origins
- Historical trends in food
- Culture and food
- Compare cultural food pyramids (see FDA Food Pyramids*).
- Birth of convenience foods
- Genetic alteration in foods
- Health risks related to poor nutrition (such as obesity, rickets, scurvy, kwashiorkor, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease)
- Famine, then and now
- Food-borne pathogens
Differentiated Instruction
Resource Student
- Encourage the student to successfully participate in all projects, which are all open-ended
- Pair the student in heterogeneous pairings or small groups to do research and complete unit projects
- Give the student extra adult assistance as needed and additional work time or task modifications as described in the student’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP)
Gifted Student
- Allow the student to serve as an expert in reading, writing, or technology
- Require the student to research an aspect of health or nutrition that was not focused on in class (see the “Other Food Topics” section earlier in this Unit Plan)
English Language Learner
- Ask the ELL teacher to help the student translate basic terms into an English/first language glossary
- Post translated terms around the room to allow all students to learn new vocabulary
- Have the ELL teacher explain new concepts, help the student complete journal entries, and help the student conduct research
- Pair bilingual students with non-native speakers for tasks that require reading and writing
- Allow journal writing to be completed in the student’s first language for later translation
- Allow assignments to be adapted, or give the student more time when necessary
Credits
A classroom teacher participating in the Intel® Teach Program developed the idea for this unit plan. A team of teachers expanded the plan into the example you see here.
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