Health And Nutrition

There are various things you can do as an educator with children and youth that allow them to question and analyse and then take steps to improve their own health and nutrition. And by doing so you nurture them as future producers and consumers who will be more conscious and caring about environment and safe food.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

  1. Get children to measure their own height and weight for themselves. Any child with basic knowledge of two digit numbers can be involved (perhaps ask the Maths teacher to guide the observation and recordings)
  2. Get children who are familiar with Division and Multiplication to calculate their own Body Mass Index. A simple factsheet about BMI can be found here : https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life-style/bmi-calculator. Arrange to give periodic data to the local health centre or involve a health worker in the community during this exercise.
  3. Get children interested in keeping a food diary- find out food grown in home/ village; find out food brought from outside. Could be done thrice a year to see seasonal variations . Talk about food miles and why eating local is important. Here( https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/30/dining/climate-change-food-eating-habits.html ) is one nice article that gives an overview of food and climate change but it is not in the Indian context( so perhaps work towards making it more contexual as an output using data from sources like https://www.downtoearth.org.in/
  4. Grow some greens ( e.g. Methi(fenugreek) ) in school and home ; introduce the science and nutritional basics behind sprouting pulses and sprout them in classrooms.
  5. Make a disease profile- survey to find out from the family and village in the last 3 months who has fallen ill and why.   This way together you can figure out what diseases affect the school community and when in order to  highlight problems/ issues for the local health centre.
  6. The above exercise will help to take it further in figuring out preventive and curative measures for each disease. Get a doctor to visit a classroom and explain! Get a local Ayurvedic practioneer to visit and explain. Discuss home remedies in class. Get chidlren to write down its recipes. Make one concoction in classroom for simple cures.Like lemon grass tea or a ginger and pepper tea or making an ORS in classroom for diarrhea.
  7. Work towards growing a herb garden in school. Local herbs , their uses can be recorded in a language class . A recipe book can also be created!
  8. There is some interesting work done by Kolkota based NGO called, Development Research Communication and Services Centre (DRCSC) on vegetables. Use this book as a guide for several learning activities with children and youth related to Vegetables.