Division of Nutrition Assistance

Nutrition Across the Curriculum: Rationale

Nutrition Across the Curriculum: Lesson Plans for Grades PreK-12 is a compilation of nutrition lessons that have been correlated to standards and benchmarks set by the Louisiana Department of Education in health, physical education, science, mathematics, English/language arts, and social studies. The lessons are designed to be an enhancement for teaching and learning across the curriculum that will result in positive behavior change.

The lessons can be taught individually or can be combined to form a unit of study. However, the alignment of nutrition lessons with standards and benchmarks provides for easy integration of the information into routine instructional planning. This integration of nutrition information into content area teaching utilizes the resources of the classroom, the school, and the community.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) (1996, p. 9) advocates the need for school-based nutrition education. Because a high percent of all children and adolescents are enrolled in school, the classroom environment is ideally suited to give students the skills and support needed to adopt healthful eating behaviors for life. Teachers, food service personnel, and other staff can offer their expertise and model appropriate eating behaviors. Additionally, students have opportunities to practice healthful eating behaviors at school.

While the CDC recommends that health be taught as a separate unit in a sequential format, an additional unit of study is not always feasible. Fortunately, many nutrition concepts are easily linked to benchmarks in science and mathematics as well as in English/language arts and social studies. The CDC further recommends that effective nutrition education should be behaviorally focused on content that is developmentally appropriate and culturally relevant. Each lesson has been identified with one primary subject area; however, interdisciplinary standards and benchmarks have been identified for most of the lessons.

Students are more likely to make healthful eating choices when they receive consistent, reinforced messages from a number of creditable sources within an environment that encourages healthful choices. Collaboration among school food service staff, teachers, the community, families, and institutional services is necessary. Learning activities should provide hands-on experiences that are fun and that provide repeated opportunities for students to taste foods that are low in fat, sodium, and added sugars yet high in vitamins, minerals, and fiber. Nutrition education activities should provide positive aspects of healthful eating behaviors and should address social learning techniques such as role modeling and peer interaction.

The Louisiana Department of Education, Division of Educational Technology, sponsors the Making Connections website, which is a database of technology-rich lesson plans. The lessons correspond with specific content area benchmarks and standards established by the State Department of Education. Lesson plans from Nutrition Across the Curriculum: Lesson Plans for Grades PreK-12 are placed on the Making Connections website. This placement increases the visibility of the lessons and provides a system for distributing, updating, and adding lessons for many years.

In 2001, a lesson-writing team of teachers identified these lessons as being well received by students. The lessons were updated to include technology and the latest nutrition information. The lessons were piloted by over 40 teachers in 23 schools in 12 different school districts throughout the state.

In 2003, existing lessons were reviewed and aligned with health and physical education standards. Additionally, 13 lessons were developed to address healthful eating and physical activity habits.