My school has been on a healthy eating kick! We keeping up the momentum we gained during our NFL Play 60 win are having a school wide theme of healthy eating and exercise. We are doing a family reading night next week with this theme as well as a door decorating contest. Now although it’s been my year long mission to become more crafty and cutesy – I still don’t think my bright yellow door decor stands a chance against the elaborate, 3-D extravaganzas down the hall – but it hold it’s own. And even better – it’s interactive. I get extra points for that right?
Theory behind an interactive bulletin board: I freaken love interactive bulletin boards (autism awareness bulletin board & Dr. Seuss bulletin boards). Now while I would love to say that my students have ample inclusion time with the regular education students – it’s just not the case. With the ever increasing hyper focus on state testing, common core, and other district mandated assessments – the time for “extra” activities seems to fall quickly to the wayside. When I started teaching, we used to do some really amazing reverse inclusion activities, shared classrooms, and special incentive trips – but there simply isn’t as much time for it anymore. Enter – the interactive bulletin board. It’s a quick and simple way to get the regular education students involved in my room and with my students. During passing periods or before/after school, students engage with the activities on the boards. Enter – my stalkerish self – I have a few of my students go out and explain the board, ask them questions, etc. It provides an awesome context for an appropriate social interaction and (don’t worry!) doesn’t take away any instruction time. Okay rant over – onto the boards.
So for healthy eating, we did a “Eat this, not that” collage (I told you I’m obsessed with collaging, right?) on one door and an interactive sorting activity and guessing calories activity on the other door.
Here is the collage:
Here is the sorting healthy vs. unhealthy foods. I had the kids make all the pieces. They had a blast. I love using the student made pieces for sorting – turned out so cute!
Here is the Guess the Calories board. This one is tricky! I made a cheat sheet answer key. This way my students can go check the other students’ answers!
Now onto your freebie, right? Now these fun activities don’t need to be just for a door or bulletin board. These would be really great activities to work on discrimination and social studies! This PDF has the labels for Eat this/not that, sorting healthy/unhealthy, and guess the calories. It also has the boxes I used for my students to draw the food pieces in as well as the food images with calories. Happy sorting and collaging 🙂 Eat This, Not That
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2 Responses
Another way I’ve done sorting of Good Snacks/Bad Snacks is by actually collecting real snack packages, the small snack size are best and then laminating them. Next we sort them into a basket labeled with the appropriate symbol. I have elementary kids so sometimes I even use a little grocery cart so they can shop for the snacks when it is their turn to bring back a snack after I lay the snack pkgs. around the room.
So cute! Thanks for sharing that idea 🙂