Increase Your Impact with Interdisciplinary Learning

Traditional curricula with distinct subject areas often devote minimal time to nutrition education. This traditional approach is often sufficient to impart nutrition knowledge, but may not be sufficient to change student attitudes, and more importantly, behavior. So how do you seek out more time for nutrition education--enough to make a difference? You can increase your educational impact by incorporating an interdisciplinary approach to teaching important nutrition concepts. Not only will you be more likely to impact student attitudes about food and their food choices, but you'll also reap a number of other educational benefits, as well.

Why Integrate?

Traditional curricula have long been compartmentalized into distinct subject-area packages. Those pushing for educational reform point out that this approach doesn't reflect real life, where often one action flows into another. Real life isn't broken into small units where we only do something for a few minutes, then drop it to do something completely unrelated. Thus, there is a current push towards interdisciplinary learning and curricula that better reflect real life and problem solving, which is almost always multifaceted. Interdisciplinary nutrition lessons capitalize on logical connections that cut across subject areas. Lessons or units may be organized around a central nutrition theme, question, problem or project. An interdisciplinary curriculum can help promote better eating habits while at the same time integrate core and allied subjects for more meaningful learning.

Interdisciplinary Lessons for Early Childhood/Lower Elementary

The following examples of lesson objectives show how you can make nutrition education part of several curriculum areas while at the same time promoting an important nutrition message. In this case the theme is "Five A Day" which encourages students to consume at least five fruits and vegetables every day.

Health: Students state the importance of washing hands and fruits and vegetables before eating through a rhyme and finger play.

Science: Students will deduce some of the factors involved in growing vegetables and will apply their knowledge in growing sprouts.

Social Studies: Students will follow the sequence of events involved in getting tomatoes from the farm to the grocery store.

Interdisciplinary Lessons for Upper Elementary

Here are samples of age-appropriate lesson objectives that span three subject areas. The central nutrition concept: We are empowered to make food choices for a healthy diet

Language Arts: Students keep a food diary, evaluate their diets and write a newspaper report.

Math: Students learn to read clues on food labels to make healthy choices and compare serving sizes. Students examine the fat content of snack food and calculate fat content per gram.

Arts: Students plan a TV ad on making low fat choices