Our current curriculum theme is Health and Fitness, which has naturally been led by Science and PE. This week you would have delighted in the image of me attempting the double cross skip!
It comes with a pretty high difficulty rating! We were all outside doing a big year group skipping session which has proven a lot of fun over the last few years.
I did manage it though and along with some of the children I think I am getting better each week. It is all part of our efforts to get the children enjoying exercise and keeping active.
We have been learning about food groups today and also different fruit for healthy smoothies we are designing. Our specialist art teacher is covering the design of packaging and we are looking at the smoothie ingredients.
To assist with this we have been doing fruit tasting and exploring the various nutritional value of fruit. Smoothie Operator is a lovely little smoothie simulation tool that we have had fun using. From the Science Year website (which is well worth exploring), it allows you to create a smoothie from all sorts of different ingredients from the different food groups.
We challenged our children to make the most UNHEALTHY smoothie they could. Once blended (and we have done the little blending dance, play the game you’ll see!) you can then find out about the various levels of SALT, SUGAR, FATS etc. Useful for the children to see the colour coding as it is the same on most food packaging in the UK. We then tried to make a super HEALTHY smoothie as well.
Today we looked at the food pyramid and the children made their own using SMART Notebook. We reinforced this with a couple of little games that they really enjoyed. The first was Monster Nutrition from the Nutrition Explorations site run by the US Dairy Council. It is a bright and fun site, and the Monster Nutrition game has more depth than most.
You have to grab different food from the conveyor belt in the foreground and fire it at Mungo the nutrition monster! When he gobbles it up it gives you information about the food group and then some further multiple choice questions. The kids enjoyed this one and had to choose something from each part of the food pyramid to progress.
Another US site we have used is MyPyramid.gov and the Blast Off game which asks the children to plan a whole day of meals and exercise in order to fuel a rocket to Planet Power. There is great depth and detail in the information provided in the game. It is engaging and reinforces: food groups; nutritional values; balanced diets and the need for the right sorts of food throughout the whole day.
I like the fact the children need to consider the different amounts from each food group and strike a balance with them all. They can also choose from a range of exercises to go along with their meals. As the children add their food items the game alerts them to alternatives to butter for example, or congratulates them for choosing whole grain. All good messages provided in a very good little game.
I just thought I should share these with you as they are new on my radar for this year. Don’t worry, more skipping updates soon!