Health: Healthy Living

In the unit "Healthy Living", students will look at how they can apply their knowledge of health and living to make reasoned decisions on personal food choices, and how those choices relate to mental health, personal health and over all well-being. Students will understand and identify ways in which different types of nutrients contribute to healthy development. As well as identify strategies for promoting healthy living at home, school, and community.

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Self Care/Self Love

Thursday, January 14, 2016

This lesson we focused on ways we can practice self care and self love. 

We explored stress further and through drama the students preformed skits of stressful situations and positive ways to deal with the stress.

We expanded this further into self care and discussed how self care stems from self love, and using positive strategies to deal with negative situations in order to care for ourselves. 

Students were given pieces of text from poems on self love:

Example of text given to students

Students used vocal collage to present the texts out loud to the class.

We discussed affirmations (support or encouragement) and how stating self-affirmations can help us practice self love.

At the beginning of the lesson students were asked to write one thing they did not like about themselves on the board.
At the end of the lesson we erased the negative things and we wrote things we love about ourselves.

What? Me? Worry?

Thursday, January 14, 2016

Our goals for the lesson

As a whole class, we brain stormed what exactly stress is, what kinds of stress their are, and the ways we behave when we are stressed out.

Again as a class, we categorized stressed into 3 areas: major life events, long-term worries, and daily hassles. We identified some examples of these categories. We also brainstormed ways that people can cope with stress, positive and negative.

We made a road with the green tape across the classroom. This road represents our daily lives. Students were asked to write on a sticky note something that they are stressed about and place the sticky on the road. The stickies are the potholes on the road and symbolize the stresses we have as we travel through our lives.

One student closes their eyes and has one person guiding them down the road, where to step, where to turn.
While on one side students yell negative comments (you can't make it) and on the other side students yell positive comments (you can do it). We did this with 3 different students.
Some discussion:
Those with their eyes closed tended to focus more on the negative comments than the positive ones.
The guiding voices are the support of our friends and family.
Once the blinded person switched spots, they wanted to yell negative comments to get back at those putting them down.
You may not believe one positive comment if you are hearing negative comments all day.
One positive comment can help someone get through their day.

Students ended lesson with a journal entry.

What's On Your Plate?
Friday, January 9, 2016

The goals for the lesson

First students were asked to brain storm foods we associate with positive events such as holidays, family gatherings, or seasons. These foods included more meals, or sweets we would have for celebrating.
Then they were asked to brainstorm foods we associate with negative or stressful events.
We came to find all of the foods we associate with negative events were sugary foods.
We saw that some foods over lapped for both events: Ice cream for celebrating or Ice cream for sad break ups.

We watched How Sugar affects the Brain, and discussed why we may turn to sugar when we are sad or stressed. Sugar triggers a reward system in our brain, and can trick our brain into helping us feel more happy when we are upset.

Next we watched How diet affects depression, and discussed how foods with more nutrients can provide our brain and body with more nutrients, vitamins, and minerals which make us feel healthier and give our body what it needs. Healthy eating does not necessarily treat depression, but if we are eating healthy it can certainly help with it.

Activity: What's on your plate?

Students were asked to draw on their plates a meal they associate with a positive event or a negative event. And on the back of the plate give a description of the meal and event.

They were given handouts where they could find the types of nutrients the foods on their plate had, and compared their plates with others.

Some findings when we compared the meals on our plates

We talked about how mental health is a triad of body, mind and soul. The students came up with the things we can do for each category that are good for our mental health.

We ended with an exit question

What Are My Options? (Mind Your Food Choices)

Friday December 11, 2015

We began by going over some goals for the lesson 

We had a class brainstorm on ways we can identify if a food choice is healthy. Some things we came up with were: if the food is green, if it is organic, or if we grow it at home. When we are out or grocery shopping and we are looking at canned products or packages, we can look at the nutrition facts, or look at the Canada Food Guide. 

Next we moved on to an activity where the table groups selected a nutritional guide from a fast-food restaurant and chose a healthy choice and less healthy choice and compared them by tallying which choice beat the other in each category. The groups presented their findings in front of the class.

Here we made some discoveries:

• We have to looking at serving size when we are comparing because one may be a smaller than the other, so what would the comparison be if they were equal sizes?
• There is a lot of sodium in EVERYTHING we found
• Just because you are ordering a salad it may not be very healthy because of the dressing, or added cheese and meat
• We may assume that one thing may be healthier than another (example: a Tim Horton's muffin over a Tim Horton's donut), but this may not always be the case!

The next activity we chose two items based on their names, and drew them onto our poster paper. After we checked the nutritional information to see if the choices we made were correct.

What we discovered:

• We could make choices based on size in the name. If we have a craving for a burger we could be okay ordering a Baby Burger instead of a Mozza Burger.
• Words like "sweet" or "saucy" or anything with added ingredients (example: apple strudel vs caramel apple strudel) would let us know there is extra ingredients involved that we may not need.
• One group compared Fruitopia to Coke and discovered Fruitopia to be less healthy (more sugar). We can't always assume we will know the best options. 

We compared these two breakfast choices as a class and went over what would be the better option and how we know. We can see yogurt winning in a lot of categories. We saw that it had more calories but if we look at the serving size it was double of the hashbrowns, so actually yogurt would have less calories by comparison.

We also talked about how we should look at what kind of macronutrients and micronutrients we can find in our food choices. Fast food is not really rich in these nutrients. 

As a class we made some conclusions from our activities. We also talked about how unhealthy eating can relate to stress, anxiety, and affects not just our physical health but our mental health as well.

Lastly we used this formula by weight watchers to see how many points various food items would take up in our day. We found out (on an app that calculates age, gender, weight, height) that Miss C. can consume 26 points a day. Something like a Rolo McFlurry would take up 21 of my points and I would not have much else left to eat for the day. That would not give me any nutrition that I would need for my day, and I would probably be very hungry later on.