In this fast-pace life the easiest foods are usually prepackaged, salt-enriched, and carb-loaded. While these foods may temporarily satisfy hunger, youth athletes need essential nutrients to excel in their sport. Nutrition is important for parents, coaches, and athletes to understand since inadequate nutrition has temporary and long-lasting…

The Biggest Mover Program, an educational program to improve daily exercise and healthy eating was developed to address the learning needs of students with intellectual and developmental disabilities and physical challenges. The program was part of a three-part program to improve the knowledge of students, staff, and teachers through the use of…

"A Framework for K-12 Science Education" (NRC 2012) recommends that science teachers provide experiences for students to see "how science and engineering pertain to real-world problems and to explore opportunities to apply their scientific knowledge to engineering design problems once this linkage is made" (NRC 2012, p. 32). To…

How better to promote a healthy lifestyle than to get an entire middle school involved in analyzing dietary information? This article describes a series of activities that was part of an interdisciplinary schoolwide effort to discuss healthy food choices. Mathematics teachers chose to focus on students' dietary habits and, over several days,…

This set of inquiry lessons is adaptable for middle school through high school life science or biology classrooms and will help meet the NSTA scientific inquiry position statement (2004) and the AAAS benchmarks (1993) and NRC standards (1996; 2000) related to health and food literacy. The standards require adolescents to examine their own diet and…

This inquiry-based activity provides a real-world example that connects to students' everyday seafood choices. In fact, many students went home and insisted to their parents that they should only buy "green" seafood choices. It was also an effective activity because students were able to use what they learned about ocean ecosystems and…

When students take a stance on authentic social issues in their English classrooms, they have the opportunity to imagine their world as otherwise. Along with attention to other intellectual skills and civic skills, educators should prioritize the development of imagination, as it is "crucial" if students are to "project and embrace a vision for…

With a growing number of school hours devoted to increased instructional time and physical education programs being scaled back in many schools, the afterschool hours are becoming increasingly crucial to ensuring the healthy development of the nation's youth. Additionally, with students spending the majority of their waking hours and consuming the…

This brief discusses aspects of healthy diets for children in elementary and middle school. It summarizes the current guidelines and recommendations for child nutrition and provides information for schools and out-of-school time programs about how to measure child nutrition. (Contains 27 endnotes.)

This study identifies the nature of nutrition environment in middle grades schools from the principals' and superintendents' point of view and determines which elements of a school's nutrition environment these school administrators considered most relevant to students' health and well-being. Most school administrators did not think the…

Fighting the childhood obesity problem at Mayfield Middle School is an ongoing campaign. As a family and consumer sciences (FCS) teacher, the author decided to go outside the box to teach students and their families how to cook healthy dishes, eat a balanced and nutritious diet, and exercise regularly. All students at Mayfield attend a 6-week…

Children and adolescents live in a world where thin is "in" and the pressure to conform to society's view of the ideal body, when combined with other life factors, can set the stage for an eating disorder, a psychiatric illness characterized by an extreme desire to be thin and an intense fear of weight gain. Clinical eating disorders and…