This unit is designed to last 6 weeks in the classroom, and many years to come. The beginning of the unit will be designed as an overview of healthy living; good sleeping patterns, eating healthy, and being active. Once the class has charted the results of the initial questionnaire, we will discuss our challenge for the next 6 weeks. I will explain to the class that they will have to pay attention to how much sleep they are getting, how many fruits and vegetables they are eating, how much exercise they are getting, and how much "screen time" they are viewing.
Week 2–3 will be focusing on eating habits. I will incorporate children's picture books into the unit and the students will keep a food journal. The foods will be placed into 3 columns: green, yellow and red. One of the many books we will read, is a book by William Sears entitled,
Eat Healthy, Feel Great
. Sears does a terrific job highlighting green light foods, which are the foods that give us great energy and maintain our wellbeing. He touches upon yellow light foods, which are ok some times and then red light foods, which will make you tired and moody.
Week 4–5 we will concentrate on physical activity. We will discuss the importance of being active every day, and how "screen time" takes away from being active and feeling great. We will use children's picture books to read about different examples from people's lives. We will also start recess during the school day. In our food journals we will add the minutes spent exercising after we logged our daily food intake. Daily, we will also chart our moods. There will be 3 faces; a happy face for a great mood, great energy kind of day, a blah face for an O.K. day with a little energy, and then there will be a sad face for very low energy type of day.
Week 6 will be a week to look at our food journals and notice the outcomes of the past few weeks. We will have discussions, as well as graphing days of the data we collected. We will talk about our good days good energy, as well as our bad days with little energy. This will also be the time we take the questionnaire again that was taken 6 weeks ago and notice the change in responses. The students will be able to see that the body works well and feels good when it is active and healthy.