Dishing up Science: Integrated Content Links History, Microbiology, and Nutrition

Abstract

ABSTRACT Although public health recommendations encourage educators to include nutrition into the school day to prevent obesity, teachers cite lack of time as a common barrier. Thus, they are often told to integrate nutrition across the curriculum. The purpose of this project was to create an educational program integrating easy-to-demonstrate experiments with lessons illustrating key concepts in microbiology, nutrition, and food history for elementary school groups visiting a museum. Programs were created by researching and developing short lessons with visual aids, hands-on science experiments, handouts, and teacher’s guides that could be used by museum staff. These lessons were aligned with New Jersey elementary school curricula and learning standards. This project illustrated a creative approach to integrating microbiology, nutrition, and history content into the curriculum so that teachers could more easily fit nutrition into the school day.

Keywords

• nutrition
• education
• integrated content