How can we make our school community healthier? This is the big question Year 3 children at Kanes Hill Primary have been investigating with the support of their teachers, Mr Steve James and Mr Mark Hunt, as part of their participation in the COSMOS project.
The Year 3 teachers have worked with University of Southampton partners, Andri Christodoulou and Sam Weston on adapting their science curriculum to make it more open to their community. We focused on finding ways of increasing parental involvement and providing opportunities for parents to participate in their children’s learning opportunities. Children visited Winchester Science Centre, our societal COSMOS partner, where they learned more about how the heart works and got to see one close up!
Children, through science inquiry, learned about the human body and did investigations to find out how to keep their bones strong, food that is necessary for health and grown, and nutrients in foods to keep the body healthy.
Children worked with their parents across three COSMOS sessions organised in collaboration with external stakeholders. The first COSMOS session focused on learning what it means to be healthy through personal and social inquiry learning activities. Children, working with parents and carers, drew different parts of the human body and talked about what they can do to keep them healthy. They then talked about ways to identify how healthy the school community is. As a result, children, with their parents designed questions for a questionnaire, that was then handed out to all children, attending parents and staff at the school asking them about their exercise and eating habits.
The second session was run by the Saints Foundation, who organised active activities for parents and children to learn about how they can be healthier through healthy eating and exercise. Children thought about their community spaces and how to use them, they took part in fun workouts with parents and teachers, had discussions about how to overcome barriers to health such as lack of resources. The third COSMOS session with parents and children was run by Southampton Catering Services, who provide the school’s meals. The children designed healthy food plates, made their own pizzas, and learned about different fruit getting the chance to taste new fruit to them like starfruit and some favourites like pineapple, kiwis and strawberries.
The COSMOS unit finished with a lesson on action, discussing action possibilities and designing posters giving advice on how to be active and healthy; the posters will be placed in different parts of the school and the school ground.
