WE schools provides virtual learning experiences and resources to teachers and students all around the world. A need that I have seen in high school classrooms is the need to teach well-being, which WE schools provides numerous resources on. After navigating to the WE Well-being tab on the WE virtual learning website, I scrolled down to the resource titled “Healthy Food for Healthy Bodies” and chose the resource recommended for high school (see screenshot below).

I chose to explore the nutrition resources because I felt these resources would be especially applicable in a high school science classroom. Teachers can easily relate the topic of healthy eating to the benefits that has for the human body and life. To begin, an overview of what this resource was about was given. Quoted from the resource itself, “The Healthy Food for Healthy Bodies classroom resource is designed to create an experiential service-learning opportunity for students where they will develop an understanding of how healthy food helps their bodies grow and develop and provides them with the energy they need to do their everyday activities.” Sounds perfect for Biology!

There were five lessons included in this resource. Included in each lesson were suggested times, learning goals, materials, assessments, articles, and more… so basically everything the teacher would need. Lesson 1 covered an introduction to food, asking students to learn about the ingredients in food and how food substitution products could benefit health. Lesson 2 covered how food helps us grow and asked students to research how different foods impact the body. It also asked students to create a recipe that aims to benefit a part of their body, which I really loved.

Lesson 3 discussed how food provides energy for the body to use. This would be a great time to incorporate a very important topic from Biology, which is energy production in the cell. You could also talk about some of the biomolecules found in the cell, like carbohydrates and lipids and how they relate to energy production in the cell. In addition to the direct relation to Biology, lesson 3 was my favorite lesson because it included a lab for the students to do. Over a two week period, students were asked to monitor their food intake and record their observations. Week 1, students were instructed to eat what they normally eat on a daily basis. Week 2, students were asked to make a healthy choice at each meal and record how their bodies responded. Finally, students were asked to accept or reject their hypothesis and write a short lab report on their investigation. I really think this is a great lab.

Lesson 4 discussed what influences our food choices, for example, social media may influence our food choices. This seemed like a very relevant topic to high school-aged students. Also in this lesson, biological influences were talked about, such as hunger, so there is another direct relation to Biology in another lesson. Finally, lesson 5 wrapped the whole unit up, and asked students how they can make healthy food choices in their lives. A very applicable portion of this lesson was that it taught students to raise awareness of the benefits of healthy eating and healthy eating habits. Overall, this resource is something that I would definitely use in my future classroom, and as a whole, the WE virtual learning resources seem very helpful!