Applying healthy food and exercise choices to life:
Benefits of healthy diets and lifestyles

Why should students care about their health?
What food choices make the best food choices?
How much or how little can students get away with eating?
Does one student differ from another by serving size?
How do our food choices affect longterm health?

Title | For The Teacher | For The Student | The Resources

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STAGE 1 PLANNING

Relevant Standard(s) & Objectives
National & California State Essential Learning Standards - Grade 8

State standards are included here so teachers know how this unit connects to the standards. The unit includes written reflection, critical thinking questions, comparing and contrasting food groups and choices, watching a film and synthesizing information for the worksheet, and many other activities that meet health and English standards posted below.

ENGLISH & HEALTH STANDARDS NOTE

Because the state of California has not agreed on state-wide standards, the following objectives are based upon national standards. Additional information surrounding these standards can be found at http://www.aahperd.org/aahe/pdf_files/standards.pdf. These standards are important at all grade level, but differ based on middle school and high school levels.Click HERE to view the standards.

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Explicit Unit Goals

Essential Understanding
Your food choices define your future health. Healthy students equate to happy students... students who live longer lives. Such students that complete this unit will understand that their health is based on both choices they make in their lives today, as well as building for their future. This lesson will impact nutritional choices in the lunchroom cafeteria AND in their own lives. It will also draw attention to serving sizes, as well as encourage the need for daily exercise. It will also educate students on the dangers of fast food.

Core Content Understanding
People are often misinformed when it concerns dieting and good health. Poor students, especially, do not internalize or often do not take responsibility for theor own choices or actions. Through studying the different serving sizes, ideal body weight, lifestyle changes, etc., this unit has the ability not only to influence the students because knowledge gives the student power to make different choices, but their families and extended relations through the good examples shown by the students who learned lessons from this unit. These activities could influence the long term health and prolong life.

Skills
Students will learn to read food labels. They will learn how to track their faily food intake and calorie count. Students will then learn to make better food choices through tracking the statistics of their daily food intake to determine a safe amount to better determine their ideal. Students will learn about a number of exercises that will help them reach a daily target heart rate through exercise, as well as understand the interconnectedness of fitness and nutrition. Students will learn how to find information on the web through the web quest and to be able to write down facts from the video as they do their worksheet.

Knowledge
Students will know the real facts about health, diet, healthy eating, exercise, and fast food, and begin to understand that the choices they are making with their bodies today will have both short and long term effects. Students will understand this through learning about appropriate serving size, their ideal caloric intake, the fast food industry, and in revisiting the food pyramid and how it relates to today's culinary delicacies.

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Questions to Focus Instruction

Essential Question: How do your food choices define or affect future choices? What are the benefits of healthy diets and lifestyles?

Unit Question(s)
Why should students care about their health? What food choices are good choices? How much or how little can students get away with eating? Does one student differ from another by how big their serving size can be? How do our food choices affect longterm health?

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STAGE 2 ASSESSMENT

Evidence of Understanding
Students will prove they learned through class presentation and several reflection points throughout the unit. Click HERE to view my assessment Power Point presentation to show your colleagues and friends.

Performance Task and/or Student Performance [see also, Student Tasks]

• Students will consider the effects of eating fast food as a part of the regular diet.
• Students will learn about body mass index and how they are affected by food choices they make.
• Students will learn about typical serving size.
• Students will analyze the their own diets and consider ways to better meet their target body mass index.
• Students will discover the typical calories associated with different serving sizes.
• Students will analyze their own exercise weekly routines and look for ways to increase regularity.
• Students will discover the typical calories burned during exercise.
• Students will consider ways of meeting their target health rates and investigate substitutions to improve their current health choices.
• They will design and prescribe a more ideal plan for themselves.
• Students will present their papers to the class.

Assessment Criteria
Students will submit all components of the unit packet, together, as a part of the final project. Points will be issued for having all components, establishing facts, answering essential questions, assessing one's own personal health, and presenting one's findings to the group.

Other forms of on-going assessment:

• Fill-in-the-blank worksheet concerning the most important dietary and exercise facts from the Super Size Me video.
• Cooperative learning dialogues and checkins at the end of class sessions following the video and collaboratino prior to writing their essay.
• Self-Assessed learning gained through writing a five-paragraph essay describing what they learned, positive changes they can make to improve their health, and what they can do to improve the health of those in their immediate family.
• Presentation of knowledge gained to the group.
• Extended research of how health affects African American and Latino communities.

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STAGE 3 LEARNING EXPERIENECES & INSTRUCTION

Description of Learning Experiences and Activities

• Students will visit the websites and learn the basic health facts presented.
• Students will input their own data to determine basic food ideas about their own health
• Students will record their own food choices for one week, via handout.
• Students will implement healthier alternatives to some of the choices made in their dietary and exercise weekly charts.
• Students will analyze their findings and reflect on what they learned in a five-paragraph essay.
• Students will give a two-minute presentation about what they learned from this unit.

Planned Learning Experiences:

Students will be hooked through the engaging Super Size Me movie which will start the unit with lots information, big ideas, and essential questions. The worksheets, the food and exercise logs, and each student calculating their own BMI will be helpful learning experiences that will engage students in the big ideas and essential questions.

Students will be able to reflect and rethink, digging deeper into the core ideas, through their reflection paper, and through answering critical thinking questions on "Super Size Me" and on their own exercise and food choices. Teachers will assist them in every step along the way to make sure they are aware of the expectations and will give them back draft copies of their work for improvement and clarification of ideas.

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Title | For The Teacher | For The Student | The Resources

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