Food & Mood
You’ll find a range of lesson plans that help you deliver experiences and outcomes for health and wellbeing as part of Broad General Education for S1 to S3 pupils. This programme follows on from the primary ‘High 5’ programme, the resources for which are also hosted on this website. Your starting point will depend of course on whether or not your S1 pupils have already experienced many of the High 5 lessons when they were in primary school.
Food is a great theme for Interdisciplinary Learning and our Food & Mood resources are particularly well suited to a high school wanting to address health and wellbeing through a number of subject areas.
Every and any aspect of food and health can be explored through Home Economics. However, the task of influencing young people’s food culture is too great and too important to be left to just one subject. Food choices are made in a commercial, political and emotional context and the range of subjects involved needs to reflect this.
The lesson plans and resources are organised into three folders
Within these three folders, you will find more specific themes and ideas.
For example, the Nutrition section has a strong focus on sugar, fibre, processed foods, and the importance of regular eating. The food marketing and sponsorship section looks critically at how our food choices are shaped by commercial interests. The healthy weight section, explores how the media influences our body confidence and helps to create a ‘diet mentality’. Given the range of topics explored, we hope you can see how subjects such as Home Economics, English, Science, Art, PSE and PE (to name just a few) could make use of these resources.
We recommend you spend some time looking through these resources as a team, to plan your food & mood programme. An effective programme is most likely to involve eight or more lessons, with similar themes being explored from slightly different angles through different subjects – see how media literacy in relation to body image and food advertising could be explored through Home Economics, English and PSE. Body confidence and the diet mentality could be explored through Personal and Social Education, PE and Home Economics.
It’s worth taking into consideration the resources and opportunities within your school community. Most schools have a canteen with many growing food within the school grounds. Others have parents or staff with experience in growing, cooking or selling food. If you can link the classroom learning to real food experiences, it’s far more likely to be an effective and engaging programme.
Of course, these resources cover food in relation to health and wellbeing. Don’t forget that food is also a great topic for learning about sustainability too. Once you start to look at food as a theme for learning about both health & wellbeing and sustainability, it is easy to see how a range of social subjects could be involved.