Healthy Snacks for Balanced Students

The current unit of inquiry in Year 4 is an inquiry into 'Who We Are'. The central idea for this unit is 'understanding how our body works helps us make decisions about our physical and mental health'. The lines of inquiry for the unit are:

• The functions and processes of our body systems
• Factors that affect our body systems
• Our responsibility to keep our body systems healthy

For our literacy work we are focusing on these conceptual understandings: 

• We write in different ways for different purposes.
• The structure of different types of texts includes identifiable features.

In today's Literacy lesson the objective was to successfully write a set of instructions. To make connections between the central idea for this unit of inquiry and the work in literacy lessons, children were asked to design a healthy snack, write the instructions and then follow a different group's instructions to make the snack.

Children first looked at different samples of instructional writing and worked in groups to find out what the samples had in common. They shared their ideas with the class. During a class discussion, the main features of instructional writing were listed. The children then used these features to design a self-assessment checklist.

Children were given a variety of fruit and vegetables and were asked to design a healthy snack. Once they had done this, they were asked to write clear instructions using the features that they had identified. As the groups collaboratively wrote their instructions, they checked the features of the text using the self-assessment checklist.

They then shared the instructions with another group. Each group had to follow a set of instructions to make some healthy food. After the snack had been created, children tucked into the delicious food. Children then reflected on how successful each set of instructions had been. 

In the PYP we help children learn by making connections between different subject areas. This is an example of how a literacy activity was designed to strengthen children's understanding of the central idea. This lesson also helps children develop a better understanding being 'balanced' (one of the IB Learner Profile attributes).