Healthy or Not?

It is that time of year again in the elementary school where I teach. We are beginning a week long unit of sexual education. Every year we always have a handful of kids opt out and are required to complete an alternative health assignment. It is typically up to the teacher what to do, but it has to be along your health curriculum. Last year (see post titled: Integrating Technology Into the Health Curriculum) I had the student create PowerPoint presentations about different parts of the body and then create QR codes that linked to the presentations. This year, my challenge was creating a lesson that involved the math grant we received. How can I tie math into health and then display it on their math website?

I came up (with the help of my SPED IA) with a lesson that required the students to research the nutrition facts from their favorite foods. They would then take these nutrition facts and decide if they were healthy or not. They had to base their decision by calculating the percentage of total calories they were allowed in a day.  For instance if they were looking up Cheezits, 1/2 cup has 190 calories out of the average 2,000 a day. This is 9.5% of the allowed calories in a day. Not bad, but not the best.

With the activity, the students read about nutrition facts, evaluate their food choices, and calculate percentages. They can then take pictures of the nutrition facts and their percentages and post them on their math websites. :)

When planning this lesson, I expected the students to struggle with calculating the percentages the most, but in fact they struggled with copying and pasting the nutrition facts the most. They were trying to paste into Google Docs, which is not the easiest thing to do sometimes. I had to show them how to snagit the nutrition label, save it, and then upload into Google Docs. Luckily one student was really good at this skill and was able to help the other students whenever they needed a reminder of what to do.