Diet - Teacher Explanation

Welcome to Lesson 6.2 on Diet, part of the Year 6 Unit on animals including humans. This lesson is designed to help pupils understand the impact of diet, exercise, drugs, and lifestyle on how their bodies function, with particular emphasis on health and safety. The National Curriculum outlines the importance of this knowledge for pupils. Those with heart and respiratory conditions are given special consideration during exercises, and the teacher is reminded to handle any lighters with care, as they should never be passed to pupils. Heating equipment used in the lesson should be allowed to cool before disassembly. Additionally, it is crucial to be mindful of any food allergies among the pupils. The lesson includes cross-curricular links, such as keeping a food diary to connect with English, creating line graphs for experimental results, and researching the diets of indigenous peoples to link with geography.

During this lesson, pupils will engage in a practical task to create both a healthy and an unhealthy balanced meal, using nutrient and food type cards and learning pads. They will learn to differentiate between nutrients—essential for the body's proper functioning and health, such as proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, minerals, fibre, and water—and food types like dairy, fruits, and vegetables. The lesson also involves an experiment where pupils calculate the calorie content of different snacks by observing the burn times and comparing them to the information on food labels. Health and safety are emphasized, with the option to conduct the experiment as a teacher-led demonstration if necessary. The experiment aims to illustrate the energy content in snacks and provides a hands-on approach to understanding nutritional information.