Lindsey's Final Reflection

Childhood obesity and nutrition is a growing issue in schools today. As future teachers, we need to make sure that students AND parents are well educated on the importance of healthy eating and excercising. Students need to be help accountable for their food choices and they should understand the differences between foods and why foods are healthy and unhealthy.

For my service learbing project I taught my classroom of first graders about what it means to eat healthy. I read them "Inside The Human Body." This is "Magic School Bus" book and they absolutely love them. The books discussed digestions and the heart as well as other parts of the body that need food to make energy. I also obtained a food pyramid from the Horace Mann school nurse. This paper also had eating and excercising tips for students as well as parents. I made copies for each student to look at and to take home after we finished our lesson. We discussed each group within the food pyramid and which foods go in which category. After discussing the food pyramid and why we need all types of healthy foods, we discussed how imporant exercising is. I asked each student to share a type of excercise that they enjoy doing. I recieved answers from playing basketball to walking. Asking this questions really prompted students to think about their daily lives and what they consider to be excercise. I gave each student a piece of "food paper." I instructed them to write about their favorite type of food, why it is their favorite, and what part of the food pyramid it belongs in. This was another great way for students to make personal connections to the material I was teaching. We all shared our writing at the class rug when we were finished. The students really enjoyed this activity.It felt great to complete this service learning project. I think my students really took something away from it and that made all of my work worth it.

I would even like to have my students do service learning themselves in a classroom.I think that service learning is most definitely a useful teaching strategy because it gets the students involved. I think it is important for students to do things other than writing letters and simply researching a topic or current event. When they take action and complete a service learning project they are going even deeper and really obtaining a personal connection to the issue. It allows them to become passionate and involved in something that they normally would oversee. By completing a service learning project, they would feel as if their efforts and hard work were being put to good use. Simply writing a book report or making a poster feels so unimportant to students. I would like to complete service learning in my classroom from the very beginning of my teaching career AND I would encourage my students to do the same as well. I hope that my service learning in my own classroom someday would allow students to take something  that means something to them and go out and complete their own service learning to keep the ball rolling!

The students really enjoyed this activity.It felt great to complete this service learning project. I think my students really took something away from it and that made all of my work worth it. This is what changed my attitude about the service learning project as a whole. I now feel as though it has a purpose to serve my students. I would suggest to future curriculum block students that they should pick a date to complete their service learning project immediately. With all of the other work going on in the life of a block student, it is easy to forget a project such as the service learning. As hesitant as I was about completing this service learning project, I really enjoyed it in the end. It was great to see how much my students enjoyed learning about the food pyramid. I was surprised to see how many of them didn't even know what a food pyramid was. But now, they do!