The secondary curriculum review
This relates to the Every Child Matters outcome: being healthy.
This school is part of the Healthy Schools Programme. As part of the programme, a mathematics teacher, who teaches dance in her spare time, was keen to raise awareness of the importance of a healthy lifestyle among learners.
She set her year 7 class the task of finding out the calorie content of their favourite food. In class, learners shared the information they had gathered and produced graphs and pie charts of the most popular and most calorific food. The teacher used a chart (from the internet) to illustrate the number of calories burnt by activities such as walking, playing football and dancing. She then asked the learners to calculate how much time they would have to spend doing their favourite activity to burn off their favourite snacks.
The teacher then shared with the class guidelines from the Department of Health about how many calories a healthy young person needs to eat in a day. In a class debate, pupils learnt that they could still eat their favourite treats if they also enjoyed an active lifestyle. As a follow-on activity, the teacher worked with a PSHE teacher to plan a lesson on how diet and exercise are portrayed in the media, and the importance of having a positive self-image and sensible attitude to diet and exercise.
This example illustrates:
