Diabetes Lesson Plans
Students can be educated about diabetes, nutrition, and exercise through these lesson plans.
By Debra Karr
World Diabetes Day is November 14th. To keep students aware and educated on the effects of diabetes, it is important to disuss some of the facts about this disease. According to information posted on the American Diabetes Association website 23.6 million people, including children, have diabetes. An estimated 20 percent of children under 20 have diabetes.
There are a lot of ways teachers can talk about this issue. For example, they can discuss the different types of diabetes, and what the disease does. There are two types of diabetes, Type 1 and Type 2. The first is genetic and usually diagnosed in children and young adults. Type 1 accounts for five to ten percent of people with diabetes. The second, Type 2, is more common and caused by a variety of factors including heredity, age, and weight.
Students may be interested in learning how insulin works in our bodies. They can discuss the interaction between glucose and insulin.
Part of educating students about diabetes can involve making students aware of the contributing factors to diabetes, and outlining potential strategies for preventing the spread and continuation of this, sometimes fatal, disease. By teaching students about how proper nutrition, regular exercise and lifestyle modifications can prevent them from developing diabetes, they will be better able to prepare themselves for a healthy lifestyle free of disease. Through examining food marketing, promoting community exercise campaigns, and becoming aware of how diabetes can be prevented through these lessons, students will learn how to improve their health and the health of their communities.
Diabetes Lesson Plans:
This lesson exposes students to the increase of overweight adolescents in the United States. After students read the article "Examine the Data: Overweight Youth in the US", "VERB: It's What You Do" and "Physical Activity" they make inferences about how this "overweight teen" epidemic came into existence. By analyzing food marketing and lifestyle habits, students are able to list potential reasons, and based on these findings, come up with possible solutions that will affect their school community. Suggestions for incorporating these potential ideas include school wide promotional exercise campaigns and creating exercise action plans. If students are broken up into groups, and asked to chose one specific area of prevention to focus on, they may have a better chance of coming up with a project that aligns with the Health and Language Arts Standards. Have students underline health related vocabulary from one of the articles. After researching the definitions of this vocabulary, have students create their own original sentences to be used in the student created exercise campaign. Model the lesson and make sure to check for understanding throughout the class period.
Ask students if they live in a food toxic environment as a warm up. This will get them thinking, and I'm sure they will ask: "what is that?". This is an excellent way to investigate context clues and vocabulary. You can even throw in a "part of speech" refresher, as you ask "which words describe the kind of environment?". After discussing this warm up question with the students (and refreshing parts of speech) play the video which shows how American children are becoming more overweight in recent times. Give them the handout which explores this topic further, and go over the questions on the handout. As a culminating task, ask student to write about the food choices they have made in the last 24 hours. You may want to list some descriptive vocabulary in a word bank, to help them out. This culminating task could be expanded into a homework assignment that asks them to write about the affects of their food choices. It's important to model sentences for them, so they get the gist of what they are to do independently.
Words like "fructose", "caloric", "osteoporosis", "insulin", and "metabolic", can be found in the article that students will read during this lesson. These are excellent words to investigate because there is a history behind each one of them. As a language arts activity, ask students to look up the definitions, origins and meanings of these words. Then, have students make note of any prefix or suffix that is affiliated with these words. Have students list similar words that come to mind, and see if they can find correlations between the definitions and the origins for future word decoding. For example, the word "osteoporosis" has a Latin and Greek origin, meaning "porous". In the definition of osteoporosis, it says that there are many pores in the bones. See how many connections students can make by finding origins and definitions of medical and health related words that they stumble upon while reading. This will make their comprehension stronger, and give them a handy tool to use when trying to decipher the meaning of other unknown words in the future.
