The world became, their, classroom, as it, should work that way! Off of the Front Page Sections, translated…
The supermarkets became, a classroom for elementary age children! In order to increase the elementary school students’ knowledge and awareness about nutrition, the Department of Education asked the Department of Nutrition of the Taipei Medical School to set up a series of courses on teaching children about nutrition, to first, teach them the classroom instructions, then, under the teachers’ guiding them, they will, enter into the supermarkets, to put what they learned into use. The elementary age students who took a single session of these “lessons in the supermarkets” all exclaimed, “it’s so very fun!”
The Department of Basic Education stated, that this course has three sets of different curricula, fitted from the lower, the middle, and the higher grades of the elementary school years. For the lower grades, the students will be learning about the six primary food groups, and, in the middle grades, the students will Not just learn to read the nutritional value labels, but also be able to determine how much sugar is in the packaged foods; in the higher grades, the students will then, learn how to make the simple lunches from what they learned, and learn to calculate the calories in the process. And, these three sets of curricula will first be tested in selected schools, then, after adjustments are made, the lessons will then, get posted onto the online platforms, available, to all the teachers throughout the country to use.
This set of curriculum is already being, implemented in some of the elementary school in the city of Taipei right now. For the middle grade of Xinyi Elementary School in the city of Taipei, the school incorporated the lessons into the P.E. and health education courses, with the instructors explaining to the pupils, how complex sugar can harm the bodies, and teaching the students to read the nutrition labels on the food packaging, and, find the sugar traps in what the children are consuming daily. Then, the school takes the children into the supermarkets, to teach them to recognize the assortments of foods with too much sugar, to have the children select out the labels of the foods they had consumed, which had sugars in them, and having the students post the nutrition labels inside a file folder.
The Department of National Education pointed out, in recent years, there are, more and more countries that’s, introduced the children in the younger grades to the supermarkets, the food shops locally, to get them to recognize the foods, the nutritional values of the food item. The literature from researches done in foreign countries also suggested, that with the guidance of school instructor, the children will gain a better understanding of foods in the supermarkets, which will make them, less likely, to select the foods that are, not good for them, and it works, in changing their diets, they learned to consume healthier food items.
photo of a classroom session, from UDN.com
And so, it’s the hopes of the education systems, that through these, hands-on experiences, it’ll help the children understand what they’re consuming better, therefore, they are, more than likely, to make better food choices, and this, is a great idea, because, in this day and age, with obesity, slowly, becoming a top cause of death, this, is needed, for children everywhere, because, education needs to, start early in life, for it, to root down, and that way, as these younger generations grow older, they will, hopefully, take the values they’d learned, to their living habits as they grow into adults, and being healthy eaters themselves, they will, more than, likely, to pass this healthy living value down to their own young as well.