Nutrition Education

Nutrition education and the promotion of healthy eating behaviors and lifestyles are essential to students’ health, well-being, and educational success. Healthy, well-nourished students are better able to reach their full academic and physical potential, are absent less often, and have higher test scores. Through education, Wisconsin students can become empowered to choose healthy lifestyle behaviors to help them excel in all their endeavors.

The Wisconsin Standards for Nutrition provides guidance to students, parents, educators, administrators, policy makers, and the community to support state and local school district nutrition education efforts. These standards set end-of-grade level expectations. Additionally, the Wisconsin Standards for Nutrition are divided into six conceptual strands. The learning priorities and performance indicators contained within each conceptual strand consist of knowledge and skills to that content area.

Available K-12 Curriculum Resources

• Got Veggies? is an education curriculum guide developed by the Wisconsin Department of Health to assist schools in implementing garden-based education. The Got Dirt? Garden Toolkit is a resource designed to assist with the implementation of school, community, and child care gardens.
• Serving Up MyPlate: A Yummy Curriculum is a collection of classroom materials that helps elementary school teachers integrate nutrition education into Math, Science, English Language Arts, and Health. The curriculum introduces the importance of eating from all five food groups using MyPlate and a variety of hands–on activities. 
• The Great Garden Detective Adventure: A Standards-Based Gardening Nutrition Curriculum for Grades 3 and 4 is an eleven-lesson curriculum guide that includes bulletin board materials, veggie dice, fruit and vegetable flash cards, and ten issues of Garden Detective News for parents/caregivers.
• Dig In! is a curriculum guide that uses ten inquiry-based lessons that engage 5th and 6th graders in growing, harvesting, tasting, and learning about fruits and vegetables
• A comprehensive listing of all the resources available through USDA Team Nutrition can be found at the Resource Library.

Additional resources are available at Promoting Fresh Fruits and Vegetables in Schools.