Tag Archives: weight

Teaching kids about sugar content of beverages

Teaching kids about the sugar content of common drinks should be a requirement in kindergarten or first grade. Here’s one way: have the class construct a display for the hallway or classroom wall that visually shows how much sugar is hidden in common beverages. Here are some examples:

Pinterest board Educating kindergartners about sugary drinks on Pinterest.

This project would fit in perfectly with most state standards (for example, see page 10 in Health Education Content Standards for California Public Schools). And because it includes numbers (e.g., teaspoons), teachers can use the poster content to visually drive discussions about addition and subtraction. If this poster was done in a fun way, the experience might vaccinate kids against over-consumption of sugary drinks for the remainder of their lives. Ideally, project should include sweetened milk, apple juice, orange juice, and Gatorade.

Poster titles matter, too. “Rethink your drink” is a popular title (it rhymes) but is bland and doesn’t suggest that drinking less sugar is the ideal. “Avoid cavities by avoiding sugary drinks” or “Don’t drink dessert all day” might be more engaging and informative.

If you want some background information relevant to lesson plans on sugar for K-3 levels, here are some resources from BrainPOP. You can pitch the poster completely in terms of dental health.

Example of a bad scientific poster

When I give lectures on poster design, I show examples of horrific posters I’ve found on the internet. But I fear that someday the author of a poster I’m critiquing is going to be in the audience and carrying a concealed weapon, so I thought it was time to construct my own bad poster. The result is, “Pigs in space: effect of zero gravity and ad libitum feeding on weight gain in Cavia porcellus.” A list of why the poster is awful is below the image.

I encourage teachers to print the poster and hang in a hallway a month prior to when students’ posters are due. Here’s the PDF. Ideally, also print and hang my poster that shows tips on how to make a poster. More poster tips than you really need, plus free templates, at “Designing conference posters“.

Example of bad scientific poster (copyright Colin purrington)

Why this is a terrible poster

  1. Too much text (I’ve been on mission to push for 800 words).
  2. Background image is distracting (distracts from illustrations).
  3. Text box backgrounds are dark, which makes text really hard to read.
  4. Text box backgrounds are all different colors, for no reason (distracting).
  5. Text boxes are different widths (distracting, hard to follow flow of poster).
  6. Some text boxes too wide (aim for 45-65 characters per line).
  7. Text boxes not separated from each other by pleasing “white” space.
  8. Text box edges not aligned (distracting).
  9. Text justified, which causes bad inter-word spacing. Also makes reading harder (brain uses jaggedness of left-justified text).
  10. Logos are distracting, useless, crowd title.
  11. Title word art distracting, hard to read, juvenile.
  12. Title is in all caps, which is harder to read and obscures Latin name.
  13. Title is italicized, which also obscures Latin name style conventions.
  14. Author font and color is annoying (comic sans should be reserved for comic books).
  15. Author font color is too loud relative to other text.
  16. Results are presented in sentences instead of visually with charts.
  17. Section headers have too much formatting (big font, bolded, italicized, underlined, and colored — ack!).  Choose one. [Note: I forgot to number the sections…that would have been even worse.]
  18. Terrible graphic of Guinea pig on scale. Need one of the actual set up (pigs eating while weightless, for example).
  19. Inclusion of an Abstract consumes space needlessly. Abstract section should be banned from posters. Posters ARE an abstract.
  20. Plus the science is terrible! (Bad science is correlated with bad graphic design, by the way.)

This poster was published in the journal Nature. And yes, that street number is a horrific gravity reference. Sorry.