Healthy Snacks

Teaching children healthy snacks-- is becoming harder and harder-- we are becoming a society in which we are so busy, rushing here and there-- we have our children in so many activities and we feel we need to do everything.  In the rush of everything- we are also teaching our children and students how to rush when we eat and grab whatever is at hand.  Coming into 2nd grade this year-- I wanted to start to make a change in how I handle snack with the students and my everyday lessons. 
What a better way to get kids writing and learning, than to include snacks into writing.  Not just any kind of snacks, but healthy snacks!  Each month my second grade class prepares a healthy snack during our writing workshop.  I discuss the snack and then each child copies the snack off the SmartBoard in their BEST handwriting and we file the recipes until the end of the year to form a recipe book.  Each student will create their own snack following the recipe.  After each snack is created and eaten, the students will be assessed on their recipe writing, perfomance, and participation.  They use a rubric to score how well they wrote their recipe in their best handwriting, followed directions, used healthy habits while creating their snacks, and cleaned up after themselves.  The students will grade themselves and I will also have the oppertunity to grade each student's performance.
To extend our lesson of importance of healthy habits and creating an environment to keep us healthy, my students created and maintain a healthy ecosystem within the classroom with our very own fish aquarium.  My students will learn the importance of taking care of the ecosystem and giving the fish a healthy servinf of food each day!

Click HERE for the recipes and rubric! Happy snacking!!!