Balanced Diet

StartSmart Pilot School : Spring View Kindergarten

《Pathway to Health: Obstacle-free》
A balanced diet stems from childhood

Stage 1: Introduction

With the constant belief that a healthy lifestyle stems from childhood and that a pupil performs best with a healthy body, Spring View Kindergarten devotes herself to educating young children on a balanced diet, one of the things they need for a healthy growth, so that they can take good care of themselves. The school also arrange their children to exercise daily, which trains their stamina and leads to a healthy life.

With reference to the guidelines in the StartSmart@school.hk Pilot Project of the Department of Health, the school designed a special obstacle course and thoroughly reviewed the activities and menus within the academic year. For a balanced intake of each food type every day, each meal contained grains, vegetables and meat in the ratio of 3:2:1. The food was basically steamed, stewed, braised and poached with minimum amount of oil. To set a good example for pupils, teachers had meals that were cooked the same way. The school also re-designed birthday refreshments of various food items with different flavours in the hope of encouraging the fussy eaters to open up.

The school hopes to convey such message to families so as to facilitate a sustainable healthy lifestyle. Therefore, parents are asked to cook healthy food together with their children. This not only encourages parent-child interaction but also can provide them with health information about the Food Pyramid and so on.

Stage 2: Start Smart!

LIVE: Health Run

Objective: Before the activity, teach children about the significance of a balanced diet. Familiarise them with the types of food in the Food Pyramid and the recommended portion of intake. Then reinforce their concepts through major-muscle activity.

Time: 45 minutes

Materials: Insulating tape, soft mattresses, hula hoops, traffic cones, pictures of food, paper bricks, bean bags, and a toy tunnel.

Let’s GO!

1. The teacher shows a dying plant. Children observe it and discuss among themselves. The teacher explains that human beings are like plants which need food for energy in daily life.
   
   
2. Do warm-up exercise with children. Instruct them to imitate the characteristics of different kinds of food using their limbs.
   
   
3. Children walk in short steps along a straight or curved line marked by insulating tapes. Do not let them cross over the boundary.
   
   
4. Have children jump or hop over the hula hoops.
   
   
5. While moving along, they can land on pictures which show healthy foods but definitely not the unhealthy ones
   
   
6. Have children lie straight on the soft mattresses. Ask them to put their hands over their ears while keeping legs tight together, and then roll to the other side.
   
   
7. Make them crawl through the tunnel, along which were posted pictures of unhealthy food. Ask them to avoid body contact with these pictures.
   
   
8. Ask children to take out a bean bag that represents any of the four types of food in the Food Pyramid. (A red bean bag represents a cereal/grain, a blue one a vegetable/fruit, etc.) Then throw the bean bag into the plastic box marked by the right label.
   
   
9. Have children bypass the array of paper bricks and return to the starting point. Repeat the game until all bean bags are sorted into the plastic boxes.
   
   
10. Finally, ask children to compare the amount of bean bags in each plastic box to check if they have attained the recommended 3:2:1 ratio for a balanced intake of each food type every day.