Are You In Your Range?

An Online Database Exploration Lesson
for 4th Grade Health/Math

Designed by Bernadette Minuto

bernadetteminuto@yahoo.com

Introduction | Acquaint | Ask | Arrange | Apply | Evaluation |Credits

Introduction

What did you eat for lunch today? Did you eat at school, or did you eat at home? Was it a home cooked meal or fast food? How did you feel after you ate? Did you go out to play afterward, or just watch TV?

The goal of this lesson is to find out if you are "In Your Range!" What does that mean, you might ask? Well, in order to keep healthy, there are a certain number of calories you should be eating per day, and a certain amount of time you should be exercising per week. You will investigate your caloric intake, or the amount of calories that you eat per day, and see if it is within the range of the amount of calories you should be eating, or your recommended caloric intake. Once you figure that out, you can get yourself on the right track to staying healthy and fit!

Are you in your range?

Acquaint Yourself

You will be working with an online database called Calorie King. In order to answer the questions in this assignment, you must first learn to use the database to search for information. The Calorie King database has a feature where you can type in any type of food, and it will give you a listing of that food's nutritional value. This can come in handy when you want to know if a food has too much sugar, or too much fat. Or it can also help if you have a health condition such as Diabetes, and you need to watch what you eat.

Okay, ready for some practice? I will give you a list of different foods, and you will enter them into the database, one at a time, to find the nutritional value for each. I want you only to look for the amount of calories and fat that is in each item. Here we go!

Look for one serving of:

1. Cheddar Cheese
2. Celery
3. Apple
4. Big Mac

Ask for Information

Do you feel confident to go on to the real work now? I bet you are. Before beginning the major part of the lesson, you need to find out what your daily recommended caloric intake is. This means that there is a certain number of calories that you should eat per day, depending on your age, your height, and your weight. For example, my daily recommended caloric intake is 1,350 calories. It sounds like a lot, but once you see how many calories are in what you eat, you can reach 1,350 pretty fast! Go to the Calorie Intake Calculator and choose your gender, male or female, then enter your height, weight and click on Calculate. In the box below, you should find your daily recommended caloric intake. Write this number down at the top of your handout you received at the beginning of the lesson.

The next part of the lesson is where you are going to search the database for the items that you recorded in your food log for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Search Calorie King's database for the nutritional value of each item you ate for each meal. You will need to record the calories, fat, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrate and protein on the chart that I have provided for you. Once you have completed searching the database for each item of your meal, your chart will be complete.

Arrange the Answers

Now for the next step: analyzing your data! Next, you will organize your data in order by different nutritional value and finally calculate the amount of calories that you ate.

• Rank in order from least to greatest, the calories for your food items.
• Then rank each item from least to greatest by fat content, cholesterol, sodium, carbohydrate and protein.
• Finally, calculate the total amount of calories that you ate.

Which food item ranks the highest in calories? Which ranks the lowest? Remember that number you wrote down? That was your daily recommended caloric intake value. What was it? How do the calories you consumed from your meals compare with your recommended daily caloric intake? Did you consume more calories than your recommended number, less calories, or about the same?

Apply What You've Learned

Now let's apply what you have learned. Earlier I talked about my recommended daily caloric intake of 1,350 calories. What if I calculated that I ate 1,672 calories yesterday? Did I go over my recommended calories? What is the difference?

If your daily recommended caloric intake value is higher than the amount of calories you ate yesterday, then you are within your range. Congratulations! You are on the right track to staying healthy. . .

If the amount of calories that you ate yesterday was higher than your recommended daily caloric intake, don't fret! Take your daily recommended caloric intake value and subtract it from the total calories you consumed yesterday. Your answer is the amount of extra calories you are consuming. To stay within your range, you can burn off those calories by exercising. Take a look at the chart below. The chart lists different exercises and the amount of calories you can burn by doing those exercises for 30 minutes. Try to find a couple of exercises that you like to do, that will help you burn off the extra calories.

Once you have made your calculations and chosen a few exercises that you like, write out a plan that includes your daily caloric intake, your recommended caloric intake and those exercises you plan to incorporate into your life as you try to stay "In Your Range" and maintain a healthy lifestyle. You may type out your plan using Microsoft Word, or another word processing program, or write it out on paper.

Evaluation

1 = not acceptable       2 = could be better     3 = acceptable     4 = outstanding

Conclusion

Now you know. . . Are you in your range? You have learned valuable information that you can use towards staying on track with a healthy lifestyle. If you ever have any doubts about staying in your range, you now have the resources to evaluate what you are eating.

If you haven't had enough, try going back to the Calorie King database and identifying some healthier food choices that you can eat instead of that bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos. You can never have enough healthy snack ideas!

Credits & References

Thank you to:

• Discovery School for their kid friendly clipart.
• Calorie King for their tremendous database on the nutritional value of just about any food.
• Nutri-Facts for their Caloric Intake Calculator.
• Nutrio for their Calorie Burn Calculator.

Thank you also to Roberto Del Busto, my instructor for EDTEC 570, for guiding me through this project, and referring me to the Calorie King database.

We all benefit by being generous with our work. Permission is hereby granted for other educators to copy this lesson, update or otherwise modify it, and post it elsewhere provided that the original author's name is retained along with a link back to the original URL of this lesson. On the line after the original author's name, you may add Modified by (your name) on (date). If you do modify it, please let me know and provide the new URL.

Last updated on (August 2, 2005). Based on a template from EDTEC 570