Year 2 have ended their mid term topic of ‘Brains, Bodies and Bones’ by examining how to keep a healthy brain – a good nights sleep, hydration, exercise, less screen time and healthy eating all being the best ways in which to do this.
So how does healthy eating affect your brain? We knew that unhealthy foods could affect our concentration, our ability to focus and sometimes even our energy levels. So, we decided to put our knowledge to the test. We would investigate how eating unhealthy foods and healthy foods would impact us when completing different tasks.
We started our investigation by exploring the idea of a ‘fair test.’ We learnt that in order to keep a fair test we had to ensure that everyone ate or drank the same amount, everyone would get the same amount of time to complete a task and we would all eat the food in the same order i.e. unhealthy food first, then healthy food.
Then we wrote a prediction, guessing how the different foods would impact the different tasks. Would some foods affect our ability to focus? Would some foods give us more energy to complete a task? Would some foods lessen our concentration? As you can see from our predictions, lots of children believed that unhealthy foods would affect our ability to work in a productive way.
FAJ: ‘I predict that if you drink soda you will balance less.’
JH: ‘I predict that healthy foods will help you remember.’
AT: ‘I predict unhealthy food will make you forget more!’
OBK: ‘I predict that healthy foods will help me balance more than unhealthy foods.’
DS: ‘I predict that eating the chips will not let me concentrate but I think that eating the kale will let me concentrate longer.’
Then it was test time – the part Year 2 were looking forward to the most! We tested a variety of foods including; chocolate vs avocado, soda vs water, white rice vs quinoa. Some of our tests included our ability to focus when balancing, our ability to remember a sequence of numbers and words and how many star jumps we could do in a minute.
So, what were the results? Did healthy foods triumph over unhealthy foods? Were our predictions correct?
EmG: ‘Mango made me spot more differences than the gummy bear did.’
SC: ‘Soda made me do more star jumps than water, but that might be because it gave me more energy.’
LB: ‘The kale made me remember more numbers than the chips.’
KE-B: ‘The quinoa helped me to balance for much longer than the white rice.’
ElG: ‘The chocolate slowed me down when I was trying to complete the maze. I couldn’t go as fast.’
KL: ‘Almonds made me remember more words than the candy.’
As you can see from Year 2’s results, healthy foods do indeed help to keep you focused and on task! We enjoyed trying a variety of new foods and agreed that we would all try and make more effort to keep choosing healthy options to keep our brains and bodies healthy!
