British chef, Jamie Oliver, created a “food revolution” in the U.S. by revamping cafeteria lunches, one lunch tray at a time. He began by educating children on food, where it comes from and how it affects the body, and then served up healthy foods for school lunches—with positive results!

While most of us can’t tackle school cafeteria menus, we can educate children about healthy food choices and balanced diets, which are important lessons for life.

If you’re not sure where to begin, this blog provides ready-made nutrition lessons and resources.

Cross-Curricular Nutrition Lessons

1. A comprehensive K–6 resource, Serving Up MyPlate: A Yummy Curriculum provides classroom materials to help teachers integrate nutrition education into math, science, English language arts, and health. This site includes lesson plans, songs, posters, parent handouts, and other helpful resources.

2. Nutrition Curriculum Resources – SuperKids Nutrition offers a collection of sites for teachers and parents that focus on nutrition education, including lesson plans and information on nutrition through gardening.

3. This simple and fun classroom activity helps students explore the Mystery of the Senses – Taste.

4. These science lessons from Evan-Moor help students learn about nutrition through hands-on activities:

• Grades K–1: Information and activities about the importance of good nutrition, including a minibook, “I Eat Healthy Foods.”
• Grades 1–3: Students identify healthy/unhealthy foods, find out ingredients in packaged foods, conduct experiments, and plan a healthy meal.
• Grades 4–6: This unit on the human body encourages students to investigate how nutrition works in the human body by conducting two experiments.
• Grades 4–6: Two ten-minute activities have students work with the food pyramid and learn more about vegetables.

Other helpful resources for planning nutrition lessons:

• Our guest blogger focuses on 5 “superfoods” for body and brain health
• Food-A-Pedia: You can find nutrition facts for 8,000+ foods
• A long list of printable nutrition materials are also available in Spanish
• Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution website provides healthy, child-friendly recipes, as well as resources for revamping school food programs

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Contributing Writer

Theresa Wooler has more than 10 years’ experience in K–6 classrooms as a parent volunteer, has taught high school English, and is currently involved in education through Evan-Moor’s marketing communications team.