As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, many of us find ourselves having to provide activities or lessons to our students that can be shared through remote learning. The following “Handwashing Activities for Distance Learning” may offer you some ideas that you can share with your students for enrichment or new learning. Either way, they are practical life skills and habits to learn and practice during these difficult times.
During this COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been encouraged to create and assign lessons on topics within our content area that we’ve wanted to teach, but never really had time to because of state testing. In addition, the lesson(s) still had align with state standards. So, I decided to create and share this Shopping Spree: Children’s Clothing E-learning lesson. Please note that this lesson could easily be assigned in the regular classroom and fit into many different content areas.
Food Dilemmas are great to use as stand alone assignments or to assign as a culminating project in any given lesson or unit. More importantly, since many of us are on hiatus from our normal teaching routine, food dilemmas are an ideal solution when having to prepare e-learning or flex lessons, especially during this corona virus pandemic!
After students learn about the dietary villains, we compare a variety of fast food potato options looking at calories, fat and sodium levels. We compare different fast food options calculating calorie, fat and sodium differences and then apply it to an alternative fast food potato recipe prepared in the lab. Students then choose a fast food menu item, researching to find a healthier homemade version that saves them calories, fat and sodium in this fast food project makeover.
The dietary guidelines recommend that we limit these three bad boys: fat, sugar and salt (oh my!) in our diet to reduce our risk of serious health effects. Sometimes this is easier said than done with teens! In order to make this more interesting and palatable for my students, I’ve turned it into a mini comic book project. That is, of course, after they’ve initially learned a little about these dietary villains!
Students need to have an idea of what makes a relationship healthy or unhealthy. In order to accomplish this, students spend time brainstorming on their own before joining forces as a class to complete the “RelationSHIP Graphic Organizer.” This is a very engaging class sharing activity before asking students to apply it as they analyze relationships to determine their healthfulness.
Several months back, I received an email about updated resources from The Dibble Institute. This update included an article about a university study, titled “What Youth Seek in Partners,” that sparked this life long partner shopping spree activity. I thought it would be interesting to recreate the study at the high school level and compare the results to the actual survey results. Initially my students thought this would be an easy activity, but on the contrary required much thought on their part. What was rather unique about the outcome of my survey, were the similarities of answers. My results, completed with two different classes, almost mimicked those of the university rankings. Read on to see other activities associated with this lesson/activities.
Reading and deciphering a food label is like learning a foreign language to many students! Some get it quickly and easily, some don’t and require more practice! Reading a new food label is an interactive lesson that has students cutting, pasting, and annotating various pieces of label information before learning how to decipher the numbers to determine its healthfulness. Once students understand the concept, their label reading skills can be reinforced by practicing on empty food containers!
Thanks for checking back in for the Advertising Part II: Food Themed Sneaker Project. This project gave students an opportunity to build on their advertising knowledge and apply it in a fun and creative way. Afterall, who doesn’t love fun, food inspired footwear!
One of the special topics I like to teach when time permits is a mini-unit on advertising. This Advertising Lesson: Part I is the lesson before the project. It introduces students to a variety of information they need to know about advertising before they can complete the project in a very interactive and hands-on way. The project will be shared next week as this post would be ginormous if I didn’t split it up. So, please check out both weeks to see the entire mini-unit and project.
