Teaching your students about healthy eating is an important part of the health curriculum. Teaching healthy eating in a way that makes it fun, relatable and hands-on will grab your student's attention and keep them learning! My Health Heroes were created to do just that. Read on to see how I use Health Heros to teach healthy eating to my students and introduce everything related to nutrition in the health curriculum.

Teach your healthy eating curriculum using the Health Heroes. Your students will learn all about proper nutrition, food groups, healthy and unhealthy foods and finally plan a healthy meal.

Let's Meet the Health Heroes - Teaching Healthy Eating

The Health Heroes are superheroes who will help you engage your students while learning about maintaining a healthy body and eating healthy. We start out by talking about ways we can be a Health Hero. My students have lots of ideas - some that are true and some that are not. Starting a new unit with a conversation to find out their prior knowledge is the best way to find out where the learning has to begin.

students think about and record what it means to be healthy to them.

Using Picture Books to Teach Healthy Eating

Like most teachers, I love picture books and use them to launch most units and lessons. This is a collection of some of the titles I have used. Our school has a series of books about food groups that are very helpful. The Grains book in the image is an example of the kind of non-fiction book I am talking about. If you can't find them, a quick YouTube search will reveal that most, if not all, are available online.

Use this collection of picture books to launch or supplement your unit on Healthy eating.

I especially love Gregory, the Terrible Eater and The Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food. They are fun books, and the kids can really relate to them.

Using Videos to Teach Healthy Eating

There are several videos that I have used as part of my healthy eating unit that are great to check out as well. This first one is part of a series called created by the Eat Happy Project. There are videos for all of the food groups.

Crash Course Kids is another great resource for all things Science and Health.

Activities to Teach Healthy Eating

After our conversation about what it means to be healthy, we moved to foods and tried some sorting. The students sorted the play foods and food cards in many different ways: when you eat the food, where the food comes from, and by food colour. With prompts, they were able to start to see the food groups.

Teaching healthy eating curriculum using the Health Heroes. Your students will learn all about proper nutrition, food groups, healthy and unhealthy foods and finally plan a healthy meal.

We used the food cards included in the Health Heroes resource to play many different games. This one pictured is Mingle. Students had to find others with food in the same food group. They sat together when they had 4 cards from the same food group.

We also did a lot of independent practice to gain a better understanding of ways to be healthy, the food groups, and the foods in each group. We sorted food, learned about sometimes foods and created our food group posters. In true first-grade fashion, one of the daily highlights was to see if the activity page had a boy or girl health hero.

a collection of activities from the Health Hero Healthy Eating units that help with teaching healthy eating to students in grade1, grade 2, grade 3

Before our culminating activity for the unit, I wanted to see if the students could put into practice what we had learned about the food groups and sometimes foods. We gathered on the carpet and sorted my lunch according to the food groups and sometimes foods were learned about. Next, they went to their own space and sorted their own lunch. It's an eye-opening experience to have them actually look at what they have in their lunch and compare it to what they have learned.

Sorting a lunch according to food groups and a culminating activity of planning a meal.

To wrap up the unit, my students picked a meal they wanted to plan and then used grocery store flyers to find the food and show their meals. I also included pictures of food in the resource that they could use. I assessed their finished product with the rubric I created as part of the unit.

Check out the Health Heroes units if you want a fun and low-prep way to teach healthy eating in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd grade.