Healthy Bodies!

In Science, we have been learning about the importance of looking after our bodies. We have learned about animals and humans and their basic needs of eating, drinking and breathing in order to survive, but we have also started to understand what it means to be healthy. We know that to grow into healthy adults, we need to have the right amounts and types of food and exercise.

We started this theme off by investigating different exercises that make our heart beat increase. We know that the heart is an important organ that helps to pump the blood around the body, which helps to make the rest of our organs work properly. We also know that exercise and staying fit and healthy can help to improve our mental health too! In our experiment, we searched for our pulse to find our resting heartrate. We then tried different exercises from dancing, jumping and jogging on the spot to see which of these made our heartbeat increase the most. Some of our results were slightly different depending on the exercise and how much effort we put into them. We know that if we want to see our heartrate increase, we need to put in maximum effort, but it is also important to think about how long we will be doing the activity or exercise for as we have to be able to manage our energy properly. We hope you enjoy seeing some of the pictures from our classroom experiment!

We have also been extremely lucky to work with Michelle, who is a parent in our class. She is a nutritionist and personal trainer so is incredibly knowledgeable about exercise and food. She spoke to us about something called macronutrients which are carbohydrates, protein and fats. We learnt all about what these do to benefit our body! We learnt that carbohydrates give us energy, protein helps us to grow and repair, and fats can also provide us energy but we have to have these foods in moderation (this means that we have them in smaller amounts, and less often). We looked at the Eatwell plate which helps us to understand the balance that we should aim for when creating  healthy meal. It also helps to give an example of how much of each food group you should be eating.

Michelle explained to us that the plates of food that we eat should look like a rainbow and that we should aim to have a mixture of food groups within our diet. She challenged us to create a meal plan, in groups, incorporating what we had learned or found out from the Eatwell Guide. We had such a great time doing this and it really helped us to expand our knowledge of different food groups, and challenged us to be creative in our thinking.

After this, we got to try some different fruits and vegetables! Lots of us are brilliant eaters and will try new things often, but we had a great time experimenting and exploring different flavours and textures. Some of the fruits, we had never heard of before and some of us even tried sugar snap peas, even though we are not usually fond of normal peas! Some of us were not so keen on some of the more sour fruits, like pineapple… You might notice that in our pictures! However, we really impressed the adults in the room with how quick we were to try new things. We were tasked with seeing if we could spot a new fruit or vegetable, next time we were shopping, and see if we could give it a try. Has anyone managed this yet? If so, what did you try and what did you think of it?!

Since this brilliant lesson with Michelle, we came back together do write about what we had learnt about the different food groups and what they offer us. We feel that we have learnt so much and we would like to say a HUGE thank you to her for coming in and helping us with our learning. We had such an amazing time!