Background
Because of this alarming increase in childhood obesity, health behavior modification and nutrition education of school children have become a major focus area of LPI’s outreach and education program. In the 2009/10 school year, we conducted a year-long study to increase fruit and vegetable consumption and physical activity among elementary school children in 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades at a school in Corvallis, Oregon. The study was a success: 75 percent of enrolled students completed the study and improved their dietary and exercise habits, and many students lost weight (LPI Fitness & Nutrition Study). One important lesson we learned, however, was that we need to further develop and improve our nutrition education curriculum to increase its effectiveness and have a greater impact on the children's health behaviors.
Description of the Project
Our nutrition curriculum will reflect the core tenets of LPI regarding a healthy diet and lifestyle and will be divided into three age-appropriate segments:
This allows a student entering kindergarten to be exposed to the entire nutrition curriculum over the course of his/her elementary school years. We believe that a successful nutrition curriculum needs to be engaging and tied to other subject areas that the students are studying in school, making the content of the curriculum more meaningful and applicable. It will also make it easier for the teachers to incorporate the curriculum into their lesson plan. Therefore, our curriculum will include many hands-on activities that relate to math, science, and English language skills.
The goal of this project is to develop a curriculum that can be taught to teachers in the form of workshops, so that they themselves can teach the curriculum to their students ("Teach the Teachers"). This
will increase effectiveness of the program and reduce costs, since there is no need for a separate instructor. Instead, the teachers can use the curriculum as they see fit and as it fits into their lesson plans. We believe this will increase the likelihood that teachers will take time out of their busy lesson plans to educate their students about a healthy diet and lifestyle, factors that also contribute to successful learning.
This project is funded by Joan Facey, a long-term, generous supporter of the Linus Pauling Institute.
