Classroom Nutrition

GrowingGreat’s volunteer docents teach students why and how to make healthy food choices. GrowingGreat trains our volunteers before they go into classrooms to deliver each lesson through online nutrition education training. We give our volunteers everything they need to successfully teach a nutrition lesson!

Lessons are delivered at consistent intervals and build on each other, allowing students to absorb and understand what they’ve learned. Moreover, to mitigate “in one ear and out the other”, we begin each new lesson with review questions and discussions about attitude and behavioral changes since the previous lesson.

Lesson themes include:

• Feed Your Engine – Proteins, Fats and Carbohydrates
• Fuel Up with Whole, Close to the Source Foods
• High Quality Fuels vs. Low Quality Fuels
• Filling Up: What is a Serving Size?
• Label Reading
• And many more!

Hands-on classroom nutrition programs.

Fun activities such as preparing foods, role-playing, food-based experiments, and projects provide students with practical tools to make better food choices. This approach also encourages them to practice what they learn in their everyday lives.

High quality food samples reinforce the lesson’s objectives and introduce new foods (e.g., hummus, avocado, and goat’s milk yogurt) as well as higher quality versions of common foods (e.g., sprouted whole grain toast with all-fruit spread). Often, our students are so intrigued with tasting and handling the food that the academic lessons become the “icing on the cake.”

Also, each student receives a “Grill Me About …” parent education handout to take home and share with their family. This handout contains an outline from each lesson, enrichment activities, recipes and coupons that they can share with their family.

Click here to contact us about our classroom nutrition programs and to get involved!