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Student Created Nutrition Information
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Students in Mrs. Morissette's 3rd grade class had an exciting month of March learning about nutrition. We began with a study of consumers and producers. Students made food chains and worked in groups making food webs. Next we learned about the nutrients in foods and how these nutrients help you to stay healthy. Students then learned to use the Food Guide pyramid to chart and assess their own daily eating habits. Students kept a food diary for 8 days and made observations about their own eating patterns.
These 3rd graders also became skilled at reading nutrition labels on food packages and analyzing them for fat, sodium, and vitamins and minerals. The students brought in many food packages form home and we used these individually and in groups to make choices about foods.
Students decided that a food could be classified as a junk food if one of the first 2 ingredients was a fat or a sugar. They learned that sugars could be hidden using many words like sucrose, fructose, corn syrup.
We made discoveries about foods through many experiments such as the Nut Taste Test, Fat Test, Label Reading, Cereal Data Test, and Starch Test.
After a few weeks of learning new things, we decided we wanted to share the things we had learned with others. We planned 2 Nutrition Fairs.
The first was for our First Grade Buddies. We tried to reproduce many of the activities we had done in a simpler format for first graders. Our buddies made Food Pyramids, named fruits and veggies, tasted new kinds of nuts and breads, and put food into our 3 foot Food Pyramid. They had a good time and learned some things about nutrition!
Next we planned a fair for adult guests. We had 10 centers set up. They were all experiments and activities that the students had done during our month long unit. Our adult guests learned about and tasted breads from different countries, they tested foods for fat and starch, learned to read labels and use the Food Guide Pyramid to determine how many servings of each food they should eat each day. They also got to try CDs that had many nutrition activities. Everyone had a good time as the 3rd graders became the nutrition teachers for their parents, grandparents, relatives and friends. Every student had a special guest for the fair.
We learned so much that we wanted to share it with others, and maybe find other schools who would share with us the things they do to learn about good nutrition!
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Created by Deborah Barrows, 5/18/98.