All parents want their kids to eat healthy and grow healthy. However, most of the kids seem really resistible to healthy fruits and vegetables. So, is there any way to let the kids know more about the benefits of healthy fruits and veggies and willing to eat them? The answer is YES! There is a very interesting nutrition curriculum that is special designed for kids called growing Healthy Kids!
Growing Healthy Kids is developed by a garden enhanced nutrition workgroup at Oregon State University. As research shows that kids who have more opportunities to experience the new foods, they will be willing to accept the new foods and have them in their diets. Therefore, the garden enhanced nutrition workgroup designed this curriculum and create opportunities for kids to be more exposed to the fruits and vegetables in order to increase their consumption of it.
The curriculum purposes to combine nutrition education with gardening to promote healthy diet and healthy choices for kids that are 7 to 8 years old. Hence, children are the major target audience for the curriculum. Since the curriculum is also sent home for the parents to read and help the kids to follow the procedures, parents become the secondary audience to the curriculum.
There are two different sections in the curriculum, which are growing healthy kids lesson plans and growing healthy kids recipes. Each of the section comprises totally twelve fun lessons for kids to learn and experience. Some examples of the interesting lessons are digging in, root root hurray! The digging in activity let the kids to dig the fruits and vegetables in the garden by themselves and play with the soil. I can imagine how enjoy the kids are when they playing in the garden with all the plants. The names are even so attractive and make kids feel excited to participate. There are many studies also reveals that garden based and experiential activities are much more effective than other boring lessons to help kids increase the daily consumption of fruits and vegetables.
As a nutrition educator, they can effectively incorporate the food and nutrition education and also those hands-on activities with lessons provided by the curriculum. Nutrition educator should also be aware of the class size, which would seriously affect the teaching results. The class size is recommended to be no more than 25 students. The fewer students in class, the teacher can better communicate with kids and achieve better teaching results.
The curriculum has enclosed teaching outlines with detailed scripts in it. It is very helpful for those parents or others who may not have experience of teaching kids nutrition education yet, but get on the track more easily by using the scripts that provided.
If you are a nutrition educator or someone that wants to teach kids about nutrition education, I really recommend you to use this curriculum! You can find the whole curriculum by going to the website http://extension.oregonstate.edu/nep/garden_nutrition/. Just Link it now and lets playing with the kids! Enjoy planting and learning nutrition!