Physical education is key to getting the children active, allowing them to keep fit and build a stronger, healthier body for when they get older. There is a lot in the press and news at the moment about obesisty in children and Schools can help this by giving children lots of information about the right food choices. Here we talk about some lesson ideas that could be done within the children’s school day –

  • Get the children involved. Allow the children to write a shopping list for their food for the week. Get them to plan meals and what they may need for this. This could be included in an ICT lesson where the children have to source the ingredients for their chosen dish.

  • School trip to a farm where all of the fruit and vegetables are grown there. Go through the process of how the fruit and vegetables start and where they end up, even how they can be used within their meals. Get them to plant their very own and even take them home to grow. If a school trip cannot be arranged bring in your own seeds to grow within the classroom and work as a class to get them to grow and harvest them.

  • Bring in some healthy snack like carrot sticks, cucumber sticks, hummus etc, for the children to try in the lesson and get them to write down how they taste to them. Even a cookery class based on making healthy snacks for their lunch box rather than crisps and chocolate.

  • Although the children to look at lots of different foods and get them to rate them from 1-10 on whether they are healthy or not. 1 being the worst choice and 10 being the best choice. Getting the children to make their own mind up on the foods that are good and bad create no barriers and they have more freedom of choice.

  • Be a role model sit with the children at lunchtime every now and then with your own healthy lunch box so they can see the right choices in front of them.

  • If cooking cannot be done in the school why not make a smoothie bar with the children. Allow the children to choose their own fruit to go into a smoothie machine, they will see in front of their eyes maybe some fruit they wouldn’t eat whole as a drink, plus taste it.

All of the above can be linked closely with lots of other topic’s. Physical education can be a sat down lesson every now and then, to discuss choices of food is linked to health and well being. Science could be linked to this, discussing what foods can help develop your bodies, or what can be bad for the body. Geography, where do the foods or meals originate from? As mentioned above using ICT to look up ingredients for recipes. English/Spelling being able to spell the recipes and ingredients, or writing menu’s and shopping lists.