Nutrition Lessons for High School Students
Nutrition can be one of your middle school or high school students’ favorite units. Teens love anything that they can relate to and apply to themselves. These nutrition activities will help to keep them engaged and interested in food and nutrition.
Nutrition can be a stumbling block for teens as they are surrounded by all the wrong foods! Often they just don’t know what a healthy, balanced diet actually looks like. As with anything, the more students experience, the more they remember.
According to the CDC, Nutrition education is a vital part of a comprehensive health education program and empowers children with knowledge and skills to make healthy food and beverage choices.
Nutrition Activities for Middle and High School:
1- Have students bring in their favorite boxed food and analyze the nutrition label. Have them bring in cereal, granola bars, empty containers of juice, soda, etc. This activity is a nice way to have students record their label’s information.
2- Have your middle school and high school students complete the MyPlate website quiz to see what nutritional needs they have for a given day. This is fun because they get a personalized plan. It is surprising to them to learn the number of calories they should eat and how tricky it can be to get all the nutrients that they need.
3- Have them shop for a day’s worth of food within a budget. You can give $10 to shop for food virtually or plan a field trip and let them actually shop for what they need. They use their MyPlate plan to make their decisions.
Chris took his students on a field trip to Aldi’s recently after they completed the Let’s Go Shopping Activity. He gave them each $12 (we increased it from the original $10 in the project because food prices are high right now). They shopped for items for a days worth of food including a small meal for dinner.
The students were excited and actually a little nervous because they don’t shop for groceries at home so this was a new experience for them and they did a great job!
This Nutrition Lesson Plan helps you set up the activity
More Nutrition Activity Resources
Kim Graybill at Familyconsumersciences.com has a fun and free MyPlate “What’s Missing?” Activity that has students using QR codes and identifying what is missing on plates.
Did you know that the USDA releases new dietary guidelines every 5 years? It can be a lot to have students look through so I created a scavenger hunt activity that is both printable and can be used on Google. It is a nice nutrition activity because it gets the kids to look through the website and learn about nutritional guidelines for every age.
We also have this FREE lesson on nutritional needs throughout life stages. Students learn the MyPlate dietary needs for babies to the elderly and they match the meal description to the person. They can then create a meal plan for an age group of their choice! This can make a great sub plan for you to assign if you have to be out of the classroom because students can work on it alone or in small groups.
Who Am I
If you are looking for a no-prep digital activity for your middle school students to learn about reading food labels, we also have a nutrition label digital escape room! Students watch a video, read MyPlate information, compare food labels, and more to learn more about the food they eat!
This is a fun video to review misleading information on food labels such as “All Natural”, etc.
