During October, students enrolled in NTR 3450A: Nutrition Counseling and Education Activity, a PolyX course taught by Associate Professor Kellene Isom, Assistant Professor Abigail Clarke, and Lecturer Sangeeta Shrivastava demonstrated what it means to learn and become by doing.
After eight weeks of intensive planning and preparation, the students provided nutrition education to mainly elementary school students from the Pomona and Rialto school districts.
More than 500 children, along with their teachers and parents, participated in interactive activities focused on the basic principles of nutrition and physical activity during field trips to Cal Poly Pomona's Kellogg Ranch.
The lessons included selecting healthy foods from the USDA’s five food groups, reading food labels, learning about the importance of legumes and how to grow them, budgeting, selecting healthy beverages, and choosing foods that support brain development and physical activity.
To engage the children, the nutrition students incorporated familiar and age-appropriate themes, including Halloween, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, superheroes, eating foods across the rainbow, food-label detectives, the Beanstalk, and brain villains. The children participated in a variety of interactive activities: they earned prizes by answering nutrition questions, went grocery shopping with play money, exercised with Spiderman and Captain Marvel, had their faces painted, took photos with nutrition-themed props, and received planting kits with instructions for growing their own legumes.
The schoolchildren were given stickers, pencils, pocket-sized magnifying glasses, and educational materials. One of the educational handouts was also translated into Spanish and reviewed by Lecturer Stephanie Serpas Jacobo to ensure accuracy and clarity.
For the nutrition students, the experience was equally rewarding. They learned how to plan and conduct nutrition education sessions, taking important steps toward becoming competent nutrition educators.
