User Assumptions
This unit is intended for grade two, ages 7-8, for all-inclusive, general education students in a classroom setting. It’s known that students have a wide range of language and reading capabilities; these materials are designed to be supportive of multilingual students and account for reading levels pre-k to grade four. These materials have been designed as supplemental materials for the lessons which are taught in class. This nutrition unit was not intended to be used as an independent learning resource. Students do not need prior knowledge of nutrition, although they will come in with knowledge from their own experiences. Students will need computer and internet access as well as basic computer skills.
Justification for Nutrition Unit Design
Although nutrition isn’t technically a part of the second grade curriculum here in Washington State, it is an important aspect of everyday life, one which is often overlooked. There are many negative side effects to neglecting one’s nutrition including obesity, negative self-image and chronic disease.“Behaviors affecting these diseases are learned early in life, supporting the need for prevention efforts targeting children” (Auld, Romaniello, Heimendinger, Hambidge, & Hambidge, 1999, p. 403). I chose to create my unit plan about nutrition because of the importance of this phenomenon and the strong curricular connections between 2ndgrade math, science and social studies and certain aspects of nutrition.
The nutrition unit has been designed in two parts. First, I think it’s important to mention, as you will see in my unit plan, that my district participates in a daily snack program. Through this program, our students are exposed to a variety of foods (mostly fruits and vegetables) throughout the week. For the first part of this nutrition unit, I have developed a snack journal (see teacher resources) for students to track their daily snacks. In that snack journal, students record the food, the food group, where the food was grown, growing season, way it was grown and then whether or not they liked the food. We have a no thank you bite policy in my classroom, pending allergies of course. The second part is the lessons that I have developed with the graphics and of course the website. There are currently eight lessons, four of which are complete. The timeline is open ended at this point; this unit was designed to be an open ended unit, it could last a year, three months or one month, depending on the time you have available in your busy teaching schedule.
For my own classroom, I will be teaching the first four lessons at the onset of the school year. The remaining lessons will be taught at different times, based on our science and social studies units. For example, when we teach our soils unit in science, I will teach Lesson 5 (Tops and Bottoms) and Lesson 6 (Plant Essentials). When we teach the Life Cycle of a Butterfly science unit, I will return and teach Lesson 7 (A Plant’s Life Cycle) and Lesson 8 (From Field to Plate).
I feel it necessary to mention, many of my lessons contains elements from my Guided Language Acquisition Training (GLAD) which was a huge initiative for my district this past year. These elements include teacher-made big book, observation charts, pictorals and small group and partner communication. As you will see, in my lessons I use a lot of “heads together”, partner activities and small group practice and discussions. According to Marcia Brechtel (2001), “Students must have time for negotiating for meaning, comprehensible output, or discussions, using new vocabulary and concepts with someone they understand” (p. 31). Through the use of partner and small group activities, I lower the affective filter for my student which allows them to share their thoughts and ideas in a safe environment. These “practice” opportunities also allow students to prepare to share out with the whole class without feeling intimidated or unsafe.
Justification for Nutrition Unit Website Pages and Images
Nutrition Home
This page does not contain an image. This page simply serves as a welcome for students (teachers and parents too) and gives information about the subsequent pages.
Welcome To Nutrition
In the introduction graphic, I used a key vocabulary word from the unit, nutrition. In the word nutrition, I masked images of the food groups that constitute nutrition. The goal was for the graphic to be “learner-friendly” and illustrate the instructional purpose of my unit (Lohr, 2008, p. 31). In the lesson that is associated with this graphic, students are looking at a variety of images, all which relate to nutrition. By using images of the food groups in the initial graphic, my intention was, as the cliché states, make “a picture worth a thousand words” (Lohr, 2008, p. 31). I want students to see the word nutrition and immediately think of my graphic and make connections to all the information they learn throughout this unit.
Fabulous Five (Including Apple, Carrot, Bread, Chicken Leg and Milk Carton Images)
The five images I chose to use were the apple to represent the fruit group, carrot for vegetables, chicken leg for proteins, bread for grains and a milk carton for dairy. These images focus on the design principles of figure and ground, color, depth and space.
Figure, or “what the learner is paying attention to” and the ground, or “what the learner is not paying attention to” is shown in these images (Lohr, 2008, p. 102). Lohr (2008) references, “simple line drawings were favored because they provided only the essential cues (McIntyre, 1983)” (p. 100). I chose to use simple line drawings in these images to make them both “concrete” and “concise” (Lohr, 2008, p. 102). I want the learner to use the image to focus their prior knowledge and yet be very simple to visualize. Then the goal is for the learner to obtain the knowledge of the more “concentrated” information which is located on the inside of each image. I tried to organize the information in a hierarchy that was sensible, quickly and easily understood.
Clearly these images are quite colorful. Lohr (2008) states, “children prefer bright primary colors” which I used with the fruit and dairy images, however the other food groups are actually shown in secondary colors (p. 265). The main use of color in these images was for labeling which helps the learner to “differentiate information” (Lohr, 2008, p. 265). In addition, the use of color allows the learner to “distinguish different elements” (Clark & Lyons, 2011, p. 76). In the primary grades, helping the learner to build upon their prior knowledge and organize all this new information in their heads in a logical manor is quite tricky. I felt it would be most beneficial to stick with the color scheme currently in place; red represents fruits, green for vegetables, orange for grains, blue for dairy and purple for protein. You will see the use of this color coding through the website, my images, my lessons and activities. According to Castro (2007) back in the day when 8-bit monitors were in use, designers had to use “browser safe colors” but since so few people use that type of monitor now; it is not a problem and designers have a wide range of color choice (p. 82). It’s amazing, with technology advances, we see the limitless potential we have for design.
Depth is another design element in these images. Lohr (2008) states, “depth plays a critical role in making information stand out (facilitating selection)” (p. 270). In my images, I used shadowing and embossing to build dimension and detail to create texture (Lohr, 2008, p. 271). The art of white space is a design concept not easily mastered. I tried to use white space to “direct the eye to important information by chunking and separating instructional elements” (Lohr, 2008, p. 272). In addition, I use symmetry to have my images “convey a sense of calm and professionalism” (Lohr, 2008, p. 275).
Healthy Living: Food Pyramid
It’s important to mention that this image was inspired by the newly designed food pyramid which can be seen at I used this image as my foundation for my healthy living image. In my image I used both horizontal and vertical alignment. The food groups are arranged horizontally, showing no hierarchy in the information. Each food group is important and together, a balanced diet is the way to successful nutrition. As the United States of Agriculture (USDA) states, “Every color, every day.” Since the food groups are so intertwined, it was important to show those connections and as Lohr (2008) states, “thicker lines between the elements suggest a stronger connection,” which is why I chose to use the thicker lines in my drawing (p. 128).
Chunking was an important design element in this image. With the information in my graphic I tried to stick with the “7 plus or minus 2” rule that Lohr (2008) mentioned (p. 125). The image focuses on the five food groups, activity and of course the importance of water consumption. The intention is to have the graphic provide meaningful and memorable information about nutrition and healthy living for my students.
The five principles of gestalt are closure, contiguity, similarity, proximity and experience (Lohr, 2008, p. 161). I kept similar elements at close proximity; the food groups are together and the activities are together. I tied in the element of experience by using the same colors for food groups that the students have seen throughout the unit. Lohr talks about previous experience influencing the way in which a learner processes new information (p. 168). By using repetition of colors, I am providing the opportunity for the learner to connect prior knowledge to new content.
My Plate
My Plate image also was inspired by the USDA and their image located at I felt this image gave students a concrete example of a balanced meal and healthy eating. I chose to use color to represent a “differentiation of information” (Lohr, 2008, p. 265). For this topic, color coding and labeling was quite important; so that is one focus of my graphic. According to Lohr (2008), “left-aligned text is considered the easiest to read” (p. 239). I aligned all text to the left for ease in readability. I also used a 2-3 inch line length because young children are most comfortable with that length (Lohr, 2008, p. 238). Additionally, I chose to use the Georgia font for two reasons. First, it has a large x-height which has been shown to be easier for children to read (Lohr, 2008, p. 232). Georgia font is also a Web-based font and “has been designed specifically to optimize screen reading” (Lohr, 2008, p. 220). I used Georgia font for all the webpages I created. I also used photographs because I think it’s a great way to get students to connect new learning to their prior knowledge and personal experiences. I made sure that all of the images I chose were under a creative commons license from Flickr which allows the artist to control how their work is used (Castro, 2007, p.86).
In terms of shape, I chose to use both circles and triangles. The circle is meant to represent a plate which is typically circular. According to Lohr (2008), "circles and ovals are used to show unity, imply harmony, show processes, focus attention, and show elements of systems or subsystems" (p. 250). For me, the circle also shows unity of nutrition as a whole. I also used triangles within the circle to help to organize the information (Lohr, 2008, p. 250). The triangles represent the individual food groups that together, lead to good nutrition.
Tops and Bottoms
This image is a representational image, designed “to omit extraneous detail” and “intended to faithfully represent the real object” (Clark & Lyons, 2011, p. 17). Having students identify the part of plants they are eating is an abstract lesson to teach because typically, students have no idea what they food looks like in its natural environment. By keeping this image clean and true, it can provide students with a concrete example of just that. As you will see, I used the colors blue and brown to separate the information. From this distinction, students will grasp the concept that vegetables in the brown are bottoms or root vegetables while vegetables in the blue, middles and tops, are leaf vegetables.
Plant Essentials
This is by far my most beloved design. According to Lohr (2008), “You create contrast by establishing differences between elements in a visual” (p. 201). In my image contrast is seen between the repetition of the plant and also the curvature of the land and the differences in the backgrounds in each panel. The contrast is what helps the learner focus on the elemental need of the plant shown in each panel.
In my image, the alignment is seen in the panels which contain each element of a plant’s needs. “When you line things up along an edge or some type of imaginary line or path, you are using alignment” (Lohr, 2008, p. 201). It’s also seen with the words sun, soil, water and air which are horizontally aligned in the top or bottom center of each panel. The image’s title is also horizontally aligned in the center of my image.
As I mentioned previously, repetition was an important design element in this image. “When you employ repetition, you take some element of a visual and use it again” (Lohr, 2008, p. 203). As I mentioned previously, I used repetition with the image of the plant and the curvature of the “soil” in each panel or image.
Proximity was another design element that I accounted for here.“When elements are close together, they seem related; when they are far apart, they seem unrelated” (Lohr, 2008, p.203). I used proximity in the image title, What Plants Need. Rather than centering “What” between the sun and water panels and “Need” between the soil and air I placed those close to the word “plants” to show the close relationship of those words.
Life Cycle of an Apple Tree
This graphic is organizational and designed to “illustrate qualitative relationships among lesson content” (Clark & Lyons, 2011, p. 18). My goal was to simply illustrate the life cycle of an apple tree while still including the elemental needs of plants, learned in the previous lesson. In this graphic, the signal I used to focus attention was the arrow (Clark & Lyons, 2011, p. 67). I also used contrast as well, with the dark brown soil and the bright white arrows, to draw attention to that focus signal. In this graphic you also see the use of repetition both with the arrows and the apple tree seed at the start and conclusion of the cycle.
From Field to Plate
This graphic is another example of an organizational graphic and was also designed to “illustrate qualitative relationships among lesson content” (Clark & Lyons, 2011, p. 18). The concept of food in a farm field verses food on their plate is a tricky concept for second graders. They are very focused on themselves at this stage of their lives and this was the trickiest concept to illustrate. I used real photographs to help them make necessary connections to their own experiences. I kept the stages minimal in hopes of not losing them with too much detail but at the same time maintaining truth and not oversimplifying. The signal I used to focus attention, again, was the arrow (Clark & Lyons, 2011, p. 67).
Teacher Resources
The teacher resources page does not contain any graphics. This page is intended to give educators the tools and resources they need to use this unit, lessons and website with their own students.
References
Auld, G. W., Romaniello, C., Heimendinger, J., Hambidge, C., & Hambidge, M. (1999). Outcomes from a school-based nutrition education program alternating special resource teachers and classroom teachers. Journal of School Health, 69(10), 403–408.
Brechtel, M. (2001). Bringing it all together: Language and literacy in the multilingual classroom.
Parsippany, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.
Castro, E. (2007). Html, xhtml & css, sixth edition. Berkeley, California: Peachpit Press.
Clark, R., & Lyons, C. (2011). Graphics for learning: Proven guidelines for planning, designing, and evaluating visuals in training materials, second edition. San Francisco, CA: John Wiley and Sons, Inc.
Lohr, L. (2008). Creating graphics for learning performance, second edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson.
United States Department of Agriculture. (July, 2011) Choose My Plate. Retrieved from