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Fit to Be Taught, Vol.22

A Feast of Nutrition Ideas on the Internet!

If you're looking for fresh ideas to squeeze into your classroom nutrition lessons, you'll find a feast of ideas on the Internet.

A great place to begin is the Dole 5 A Day . Feast away on a cornucopia of Classroom Resources. Another cool feature on this site is a free kit for teachers who want to produce 5 A Day Live, a musical play that delivers the 5 A Day message. The kit contains scripts, costume- and scenery-making directions, and an audiotape of the lyrics for the play, which is staged in a TV studio and focuses on an evening news broadcast by student reporters. Plenty of other nutrition-related materials are offered, including a 5 A Day chart for kids to hang on their refrigerators.

Dole also provides great stuff for students! Don't miss the Kids page, where students can have fun learning the nutrition facts about more than 75 fruits and vegetables!

Finally, if you're looking for teaching materials on a specific fruit or vegetable, try your favorite search engine to search for sites. (If students are doing the search, they should start with a kid-friendly search engine such as Yahoo! Kids You'll find sites related to just about every fruit and vegetable imaginable. Many of those sites are loaded with teaching materials.

Read the full article on Education World

Wellness News
New P.E. Stresses Fitness Skills Instead of team sports, more physical education teachers are focusing on individual activities that students can incorporate into their lives long after their school days are over.

Dr.: Everyone Needs to Help Control Obesity Parents and schools need to collaborate to curb child obesity, according to Dr. Victoria Rogers McEvoy, chief of pediatrics of the Massachusetts General West Medical Group and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.

Gold Medal Performances

The Gold Medal School Initiative sponsored by the Utah Department of Health encourages K-6 schools to establish policy and environmental supports that give students and staff more opportunities for physical activity and choosing nutritious foods.

There is a menu of criteria that each school has three years to achieve: Bronze level, Silver level, and Gold level. Each school is assigned a mentor (a college student majoring in health promotion or physical education, or a staff member from a local health department) to help the school implement the criteria and to give one-on-one assistance. Once the criteria have been achieved, the schools are awarded up to $1,000 to be used toward P.E. equipment and/or nutrition services. Schools also receive a plaque with the school name engraved, the Gold Medal School logo, and a medal for each level achieved.

During the 2002-2003 school year, 88 Utah schools participated. In the previous year, 24,783 students from 48 Utah elementary schools walked 892,188 miles. Policies for tobacco, nutrition, and physical activity were written in all 48 participating schools. The number of students with access to a physical activity specialist grew to 17,071.

Read more about this program at: Gold Medal School Initiative.

Click to learn more about Action for Healthy Kids.

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