How to Explain the Food Pyramid

The food pyramid emphasizes healthy foods at its bottom and deemphasizes less healthy foods near its top.  By learning about the food pyramid, children can develop healthy eating habits while they are still young.  Although the concept of the food pyramid is now being replaced with MyPlate, you can still integrate food pyramid teachings alongside MyPlate concepts.

• Read books to children where the characters eat a variety of different foods.  Put up a poster of the food pyramid and read a book to the children like "Berenstain Bears and Too Much Junk Food" by Stan and Jan Berenstain.  The point of reading the book aloud to the students is to demonstrate characters who eat different foods.  The students can then name where in the food pyramid each food belongs.


• Play a game of matching the food to its food group.  This game is best played with a wall poster of the food pyramid and little sticky-backed placards depicting various foods.  Each child is presented with a food item placard and must stick it onto the poster in the section of the food group where it belongs.


• Color a food pyramid.  This can be an engaging exercise for younger children, as they get to use their hands together with their creative imagination to color in a food pyramid.  Black and white drawings of the various food items in each food group of the food pyramid work well for this exercise.


• Serve a meal to your students using specially divided plates.  Imagine a plate that is divided like a pie chart, where a large portion of the plate is colored as a green quadrant (to represent the fruits and vegetables food group) and another large portion is colored yellow (to correspond to the bread, cereal and pasta food group).  Each partition of the plate gets smaller and smaller with the fats, oils and sugars section being the smallest portion (colored purple).  When you have your meal with your class, the students fill their plates with fruits and vegetables in the green section of the plate, pasta and bread in the yellow section, and perhaps a small dessert in the purple section (there would also be sections for milk and dairy, as well as meat, fish and eggs).