Dishing up Science: Integrated Content Links History, Microbiology, and Nutrition

Although public health recommendations encourage educators to include nutrition into the school day to prevent obesity, teachers cite lack of time as a common barrier. Thus, they are often told to integrate nutrition across the curriculum. The purpose of this project was to create an educational program integrating easy-to-demonstrate experiments with lessons illustrating key concepts in microbiology, nutrition, and food history for elementary school groups visiting a museum. Programs were created by researching and developing short lessons with visual aids, hands-on science experiments, handouts, and teacher's guides that could be used by museum staff. These lessons were aligned with New Jersey elementary school curricula and learning standards. This project illustrated a creative approach to integrating microbiology, nutrition, and history content into the curriculum so that teachers could more easily fit nutrition into the school day.