Rationale



//'The importance of good nutrition and healthy eating, particularly for children and young people, is well recognised. Schools play an important role in providing an encouraging environment for healthy food choices.' (Australian Government Department of Health and Ageing, 2011)// ‍This unit of work has been designed for a stage 2, year 4 class of students who are attending Lilydale Primary School* in ‍northern New South Wales, which currently does not have a healthy school canteen in operation. This PDHPE context driven unit of work will therefore be focused on building the students' knowledge of nutrition and its importance, so that students are able to create a multimodal text which will persuade the school to adopt a healthy canteen model. This will be achieved as students will explore both written and visual texts which utilise persuasive language and features, equipping students with the skills to be able to create their multimodal text. The class, like the school, is mainly comprised of students who's first language is English. However, in this year 4 class of 18 students, there is one bilingual student, who has been in the school for 3 years now, and is increasingly proficient in English. There is another student in the class who has a speech impediment, but works well in collaboration with other students. This unit of work takes into consideration that aspects of nutrition can be considered 'sensitive issues', as there is great tension between the discourse of the obesity debate and the rhetoric surrounding eating disorders. This topic is complicated further by diversity of knowledge and valuing of nutrition in the students' homes. As such, the topic has been treated sensitively, with great effort being made to use correct terminology and phrasing. Overall, the unit allows the content of the NSW PDHPE and English and syllabii to be covered in an engaging manner as learning is contextualised and therefore meaningful to the students.


 * Lilydale is a fictional school