Wow…it has already been an amazing school year! I hope your year is going well too! We are off to a running start and the kids are loving it!
One of our first things to teach in science is healthy habits. My planning partner and I decided to do something fun with this since we don’t have a lot of resources on hand. We decided to make this a rotation for the students. Well…they LOVED it! It was so engaging and fun. I thought that maybe my second graders would find “flossing” the “teeth” a little boring, but NO! They had a blast.
First, we gathered up all of the materials. We asked parents to send in empty egg cartons. We cut yarn and has some new toothbrushes laying around our houses. We also collected some cooking magazines and grocery ads.
Next, we set up 5 stations around the room. We had a doctor station, dentist station, healthy plate station, healthy and unhealthy sorting station, and an exercise station!
At the doctor station, the kids has a stethoscope. We had this at school, but you could also purchase a pretend one! The kids pretended they were a doctor or a patient. It was so cute! They were really getting into it! They also watched a video!
At the dentist station, the kids used a toothbrush to brush really well. Then, they used yarn as floss and flossed their “teeth” (egg cartons)! They watched a video at this station too!
The healthy plate station had food magazines and grocery ads. The kids has to cut out healthy food and paste on a paper plate. There was lots of conversations going on at this table! Kids were questioning if some items were healthy or not. It was great because we discussed that just because something had strawberries on top, for instance, didn’t mean the whole thing was healthy!
There was also an exercise station. The kids had a lot of fun with this one! They danced to three different videos by scanning their QR codes. They used the iPad and just put it up on the board so that all the other team members could see! I didn’t want it up on the board (as others might get every distracted), and that worked out perfectly! There were only about 2 kids that didn’t want to dance, so they just did some sit ups, jumping jacks, and push-ups! They thought that was really fun too!
Our last station was the healthy and un-healthy sort. The kids colored their sheet and then cut out the little icons at the bottom of their sheet. They pasted them into the correct column. This was a good grade in my class.
We wrapped up the unit by discussing what they learned and doing our Healthy Habits Review.
The kids has tons of fun and I can’t wait to do this again next year!
