What Is it All About?
Student leaders examine the sugar content of popular drinks, make predictions and conclusions about which drinks are healthier options, and display results on a bulletin board in a common area.
Why Do It?
Drinks are a common snack choice for youth. Understanding nutrition labels helps students make healthy drink choices.
How Do We Do It?
Select the drinks that you plan to investigate for this activity.
Based on the number of drinks you choose to investigate, divide student leaders and students into the corresponding number of groups (e.g., 6 drinks means 6 groups).
Assign one drink, a bag of plastic cubes or sugar cubes, and a plastic cup to each group.
Students guess the number of sugar cubes in their assigned drink and fill the plastic cup with that number of sugar cubes.
Each group displays their drink container and shares their guess to the larger group. Rank the drinks by sugar cube content based on students' initial guesses.
Review the concept of reading the nutrition facts table with the large group.
Explain that 5 ml or 1 tsp or 4 g = 1 cube of sugar.
Ask students to do the math for the sugar provided on the nutrition facts table and determine if their answer was correct. (e.g., 12 g sugar = 3 sugar cubes)
Students share the actual number of sugar cubes versus the number they guessed at the beginning.
Students create a bulletin board to display the correct answer of sugar cubes each drink contains. Encourage students to consider these facts when making drink choices.
What Else Do We Need?
- A bag of plastic cubes or sugar cubes per group
- A plastic cup per group
- One drink per group
How Do We Get Creative?
Students use card board boxes to create a display in a common area of the school, where one box reflects one sugar cube, in order to create awareness of sugar content.
Students share this new knowledge on announcements or through posters displayed creating awareness and promoting healthier drink options.
Adapted from: Action Schools! BC. (2011). Healthy Eating Action Resource.