Lesson Plans and Curriculum

Lesson Plans and Curriculum

Students often learn best when they can experience the interrelatedness of subjects within their curriculum. This unit about the Food Guide Pyramid is designed to be taught to a class of third grade students through several different disciplines within the school building. The students’ goal is to become familiar with the Food Guide Pyramid and to understand its importance in helping them to eat healthy.

As the unit begins these third grade students will gather a working knowledge of the Food Guide Pyramid in Health Class. They will then learn to plan a healthy menu by referring to the food guide pyramid and local restaurant menus. The nutritional values of vegetables will be explored in Social Studies and Science as will the necessity of being able to read nutritional labels on food cartons. In the Media Center, the students will become familiar with Eric Carle and his story The Very Hungry Caterpillar. This book will become the motivation for original stories to be written in Integrated Language Arts. During Math class the students will create forms on which to gather data about their own eating habits. Using this data, the students will design and then analyze charts about the class’ and their individual eating habits. For a more in depth look at these activities and their objectives, please refer to the attached lesson plans.

The activities within this unit begin as behaviorist in nature, but become more constructivist as they progress. For example, in Lesson Plan 1 the teacher begins by questioning the students about foods they have eaten at local restaurants. The students are directed to answer by naming a food and the food group to which it belongs. They are also asked to chose a h...

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...to follow Dewey’s philosophies. In choosing, to show how a unit could be taught throughout the curriculum in a number of different disciplines, we emphasized Dewey’s premise that curriculum topics should be integrated.

As expressed by John Dewey, our desire with this unit and all education is “…to prepare him for the future life means to give him command of himself; it means to train him that he will have the full and ready use of all of his capacities.” (1897, paragraph6). By creating an integrated unit, we attempted to provide relevant, meaningful activities to encourage the students intellectually, as well as to provide them with life long skills.

Works Cited

Dewey, John. (1897).“My Pedagogic Creed”. In The School Library Journal, Volume LIV, Number 3 (January 16, 1987), Pages 77-80. [9 December 2004].http://www.infed/org/archives/e-texts/e-dewpc.htm.