Health: Teaching Your Homeschool Children About Calories and Energy
By Mimi Rothschild
When your homeschool child is very young, you begin to teach the basic courses, such as reading, writing, and arithmetic. In many cases, you begin to teach your child about nutrition, calories, and exercise when he or she is around the age of 10 or 11. There are ways, however, to teach very young homeschool children about calories and nutrition so that they can at least begin to understand the basic concepts. Adding courses about nutrition to your very young homeschool child's curriculum can be a great way to get him started in the right direction when it comes to living a healthy lifestyle.
Of course, we as adults know that calories are how the energy in food is measured, and we know that exercise burns calories. We may even know about metabolic rates and how the fuel in the foods that we eat is metabolized, and at what rate. These subjects, however, are a little too much for very young homeschool children to understand. Teaching them the basics about calories and energy expenditure can be done in simple ways, however. By using visual aids and helping your homeschool child recognize the calorie counts of certain foods, you can show him how much "fuel" a certain food will give him, and then you can actually show your child how much exercise is needed to use up the fuel that the food has provided. You can show your homeschool child how the energy provided by some foods is not as healthy as the energy provided by others. There are so many ways to do this through visual aids and play. The lessons will actually turn out to be fun for your child. Your young homeschool child will be fascinated by what he is learning, and will eventually delight in telling you how much energy you need to expend to use up the fuel provided by a food that you have just eaten.
As your homeschool child grows older and is able to understand more about math and science, you can begin to teach him about more detailed aspects of calories and energy expenditure, such as basal metabolic rates, the thermic effect of certain foods, and how to calculate how much and what types of fuel he needs to grow into a healthy adult.
Learning about calories, nutrition, and exercise is something that will stay with your homeschool child for life, and he will be better able to make healthy decisions as he grows, and when he or she becomes an adult.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mimi Rothschild is a homeschooling parent, children's rights activist, author, and Founder and C.E.O. of online education company Learning by Grace, Inc. Rothschild and her husband of twenty-eight years reside in suburban Philadelphia with their eight children.
Feeling that “our current system of education has broken its promise,” Rothschild co-founded Learning By Grace, Inc. to provide families with Internet-based multimedia education to PreK-12 children all over the world.
In addition to her twenty years of experience as a homeschool mother, Rothschild has written a number of books dealing with education published by McGraw Hill and others. Her Home Education Websites Blog consists of helpful online content and activities for Christian homeschooling families.
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