Nutrition Study Resources – Helping Kids Make Good Food Choices
If your student is in middle or high school, jump down to the resource list of links at the end of this post.
Welcome to our study with Apologia’s Human Anatomy and Physiology. Today, we are on lesson 5 – Health and Nutrition. No matter what curriculum you are using these nutrition study resources can be a big help to you!
I’ve been looking forward to this lesson for a while. It seems I’m always battling the kids over food choices. It was my hope that by learning more about nutrition, they might understand the what and why of choosing good foods.
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This lesson had lots of terms to remember. Since we are not big fans of just copying down all the boldface words from the text and their meanings and then, just memorizing them (boring), we are thankful for the Notebooking Journal that goes with the text.
My daughter really likes crossword puzzles. There were so many terms in this lesson that there were actually 2 crossword puzzles in the Notebooking Journal. We have used CrosswordPuzzleGames.com to make our own crossword puzzles, also.
This mini-book from the Notebooking Journal was a great idea. It allows the student to take notes about important terms in a fun way.
The USDA has a repository of interactive games and other resources to teach children about nutrition.
Create A Menu Nutrition Activity
One of the most fun and most educational activities we did for this lesson revolved around the USDA’s My Plate initiative.
Replacing the old food pyramid, My Plate uses the familiar image of a plate to remind people how to eat a balanced, healthy diet. We used this image and age-based recommendations for our project.
- List the food groups – fruits, vegetables, proteins, grains, dairy
- Add foods you like to each group
- Find out how many servings of each group you need each day
- Make a menu for a day with the correct servings from each food group
This was the project that brought it all together for the kids. They saw how to important it was to choose good food throughout the day and why I spend time planning menus.
More Nutrition Study Resources
- Teach your children to read and understand nutrition labels with this Comparing Nutrition Label Activity.
- KidsCorner from Nutrition.gov
- We are being marketed to all the time by food and nutrition companies. Learn to discern nutrition advertisements with your children.
- Keep a food journal with this FREE printable.
- The ChooseMyPlate.gov website has an enormous amount of nutrition information.
- Nutrition Activities
- Serve up some Nutrition Activities
- Super Kids Nutrition Activities and Printables
- Nutrition Activities for Preschoolers
- Edible Plants
- Food Lessons for All Ages
- Nutrition Activities for Elementary and Middle School
- Eat Your Rainbow Video
- What is a Calorie? Video
- How the Food You Eat Affects Your Brain Video
- How Sugar Affects the Brain Video
- You can check out the Studying NutritionPinterest board on The Homeschool Scientist’s Pinterest account for more nutrition resources.
I love that we both enjoyed the Choose MyPlate resources. That initiative has made it so much easier to understand what we should eat. The pyramid always confused me. The only thing not mentioned on the image is water. Now my children think they are supposed to drink milk at every meal.
So much better than the pyramid. Kids can visualize a plate easily and apply it to their actual plate at meal time.