For those of you teaching MyPlate to your middle school students Learning ZoneXpress has a wonderful resource for you – 1 Great Plate Game!
It is a MyPlate board game built on information about the MyPlate. The front of the game board has a MyPlate sectioned in the four parts and then an area for the dairy. The set comes with 95 laminated food games cards that have a beautiful photograph of the food on one side of the card and the nutrition information on the other side of the card. The set comes with suggestions of a number of games the students can play using the tear off sheets and the game cards. The tablet measures 17 x 11 inches and contains 50 tear off pages. I tore the pages off the pad and had them laminated at school so I can reuse them. (Otherwise extra pads are available for just $12.95 if you would like your students to be able to keep the tablet page.)
On each page you will find suggestions for making your plate of foods healthier, a word find, a build-a-healthy-plate word scramble, a place for students to fill in their calorie estimate and activity level, so they can determine how many calories they should eat per meal. Using the food cards, students can build a great plate that has close to the number of calories they should eat per meal. Since I have laminated the pages, I collected a bunch of old Vis-à-vis markers (for transparencies) so students could write on the sheet to play the games and could be erased afterwards.
My students had fun working together to complete the games. Just the other day I was able to use the food cards in class. The students had just learned about various nutrients. I handed out three cards to each student in their groups. Each group then had to determine which of the foods at their tables had the highest total calories, dietary fiber, total carbohydrates, etc. It was a wonderful way for the students to equate the nutrients to the nutrition label and to compare different foods. To play the My Plate game on the front of the game board with the entire class, I would recommend purchasing an additional set of the food cards ($29.95). These beautiful cards can be used for a number of activities in your class such as reading nutrition labels and comparing nutrients and serving sizes.
