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Healthy living

To teach children about healthy food choices and to encourage them to make the best choices when choosing food.

by Jude Scrutton

Suitable for Key Stage 1

Aims

To teach children about healthy food choices and to encourage them to make the best choices when choosing food.

Preparation and materials

  • You will need to be sensitive when using this assembly.

  • A collage or PowerPoint of images of people who are obese – adults, children and babies – and information and statistics about obesity in the UK and the USA.
  • A selection of healthy foods for the children to try.
  • Pictures or videos of people who are bedridden due to weight. (For instance on YouTube, but check if they are subject to copyright.)
  • A candle for the reflection.

Assembly

  1. Use some images to stimulate the children’s ideas of obesity, and discuss how people get fat, and also why people get fat – metabolism and other scientific reasons (diabetes, medication, etc.).
  2. Introduce the idea of the government’s ‘healthy schools’ policy. What do they think of it?
  3. Ask the children what their favourite food is. Ask for a few volunteers to come up and try a selection of healthy foods. A scoring system can be used (e.g. 1 point for trying the food and spitting it out, 2 points for trying the food and eating it, and 3 points for doing it blindfolded.)
  4. Talk to the children about how the church in very early times devised the idea of seven deadly sins that people should avoid, one being gluttony. What do they think this is?
  5. Now talk about the fact that people put on weight if the food they eat gives them more energy than they use. Relate this to how a car works: point out that a car is given fuel and then does not need refuelling until a certain amount of ‘exercise’ is done.

    We should make sure that we eat only the amount of food that we need, and eat healthily and exercise regularly.

Time for reflection

Light a candle, and show the montage of obese people once again.

Now ask the children to think about how they balance the energy they take in with the energy that they use up.

Prayer
Help us to make healthy decisions about what we eat and how we exercise.
Amen.

Song/music

‘He made me’ (Come and Praise, 18)

Publication date: June 2010   (Vol.12 No.6)    Published by SPCK, London, UK.
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