Hands-on nutrition lesson comes to Cooper
Kindergarten and firstgrade students at Cooper Elementary School loved sitting on giant teeth during a special presentation on nutrition and the human body during the last full week of school.
The “Farm to You” project is presented by the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service. It travels to several schools around the region each year to give students an interactive experience that teaches them how the food they eat affects their health.
It consists of several stations, beginning with a farm where students learn the origins of their food.
Susan Pickle who travels with the exhibit, said some young students don’t know where milk comes from before it hits the grocery store.
The mouth is the first stop inside the body, but after a quick lesson on oral hygiene, students move on to the stomach. The stations are divided by plastic walls.
Another popular feature is the intestines, a narrow corridor with hanging plastic strips representing the villi.
If you stretch out the intestines they are as long a school bus, the students learned.
“When you see it and get to touch it and experience it, that’s when kids learn,” physical education teacher Donna Lewis said of the exhibit.
Pickle brought nine people — some staff and some volunteers — with her to man the stations. Lewis found more volunteers, including some from a local church, to help manage the students.
The exhibit has been at Cooper before, Lewis said, and will probably return in a few years when today’s youngest students are ready for a more advanced lesson.