Young Naturalist:

I'm Thinking of a Food

Overview:

Students review the food pyramid and discuss the human diet. They play a question-and-answer game designed to encourage them to analyze the foods they eat.

 

Curriculum Focus:

 

Materials:

 

Activity:

Print out the Food Pyramid sheet. Make enough photocopies for each student to use.

Review the Young Naturalist story. Discuss the fact that humans are omnivores. Have students give examples of plants and meats that people eat. Define and discuss raw foods and processed foods and share examples of each, including those pictured in Young Naturalist. If you had students try the scavenger hunt described in the story, discuss results.

Discuss examples of healthy foods and "junk" foods. Hand out copies of the Food Pyramid sheet. Review each category, share examples of foods that belong to each one, and discuss the importance of daily servings.

Ask students to bring in food ads from magazines and newspapers (coupon inserts from the Sunday paper are ideal). Have students cut out single food items and glue them on index cards. Place all the cards, picture side down, on a table top or place them in a bag. To play "I'm Thinking of a Food," choose one student to come before the class. He or she chooses a food card. The class must guess what the food on the card is. Students are allowed to ask 10 questions. All questions must be "yes" or "no," except for the first one. Students can start the questioning by asking which food group the mystery food belongs to.

You can vary this game by challenging a student to describe his or her food to the class, giving clues to help the class guess the mystery food in 20 seconds.

Extension Idea:

Gather a variety of processed foods (or have students bring them in). Display the foods before the class. Challenge students to identify each food by its ingredient list. Use a combination of "simple" examples such as soup, ketchup and bread, along with more difficult examples such as cookies, chips and hot dogs. Discuss why this is so, and talk about top predators"the final link in food chains"animals that have no natural enemies.You may also wish to discuss the fact that, although humans are top predators, there have been cases of "man-eating animals that have killed people and eaten them.