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 * Description of resource:**

The 'Healthy Kids Association' website contains a wealth of information surrounding nutrition and healthy canteens which is the focus of our PDHPE unit of work. The website is also a reputable source as it is sponsored by the NSW Department of Health and has been operating since 1991 under the previous name 'NSW school canteen association'. Healthy Kids Association is a student-friendly resource which can be easily understood by students at a stage 2 level.


 * Relevance to PDHPE unit:**

The 'Healthy Kids Association' website is relevant to our PDHPE unit on healthy canteens as it contains information relating to the stage 2 Personal Health Choices (PHS2.12) and Active Lifestyle (ALS2.6) strands which are the focus outcomes (Board of studies, 2006, pp. 26, 32). Students can explore the website finding specific information on; links between nutrition and performance, healthy canteen policy, the benefits of healthy eating and what constitutes a balanced diet. The resource links with the sequence of lessons as it helps to build up the field knowledge and specialised vocabulary needed in their exposition texts. The website also introduces the students to a multimodal text, as the information is presented through text, images, graphs and videos. Students can use this resource as a basis for their research for their exposition texts, whilst also gaining ideas for their own multimodal video to be produced at the end of the unit.


 * Literacy aspects covered in resource:**

The ‘Healthy Kids Association’ website covers both written and visual literacy aspects. The website will be a helpful resource in building up the students’ knowledge about expositions, nutrition and healthy canteens as some of the pages follow the same structural features of expositions (e.g. ‘school canteens’), include technical nouns (e.g. obese, nutritious, habits) and also explore varying degrees of modality to express opinion (e.g. need, strongly supported, important, ensure), which are a key grammatical feature of expositions (Board of Studies, 2007, p. 70; Droga & Humphrey, 2009, p.144). It will help the students in developing their background context of nutrition in the beginning of their expositions as well as provide the basic information for the students’ series of arguments.

The visual literacy aspects covered in the text are quite varied and allow for many teaching points. The photographs are a combination of close-up, medium and long shots, generally illustrating nutritious foods and happy students to reflect the outcome of implementing a healthy canteen in the school and also the social distance between the viewer of the images and the people in the photographs (Unsworth, 2001, p. 96). The majority of the images are taken at eye level, such as the images of students at healthy canteens to evoke a sense of equality between the participant and the viewer (Unsworth, 2001, p.98). All of the visual images have high modality as they are naturalistic representations of people or food with high colour saturation (Unsworth, 2001, p. 99). The ‘Healthy kids lunchbox video’ will be a useful example for the students when they begin to compile their own video about health canteens as it uses a variety of visual literacy features including salience, vectors, offers/demands, use of colour and various camera angles and shots (Callow, 2006, pp. 11-15). The visual metalanguages in this website could be explored with the students to develop the students’ vocabulary to describe images, whilst also supporting critical interpretations of their own final multimodal video text and the visual texts they encounter in the wider social and cultural contexts (Callow, 2006, p.20)

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