About Dinner Tonight Junior
Dinner Tonight Junior is a program that educates students about living a healthy lifestyle using 20-minute lessons. Youth will learn through lots of fun hands-on activities.
The goals of Dinner Tonight Junior are:
- Promote healthy lifestyles within youth and their families by encouraging youth to educate their peers, families, and communities
- Provide ways to increase healthy eating and physical activity
- Provide options when making daily healthy food choices
The lessons use a 4A dialogue approach: Anchor to connect to youth’s interests or experience, Add new information, Apply the new information, and Away: goal setting challenge to use this information in their daily lives. Youth co-teach with educators at their school.
Dinner Tonight Junior can be facilitated by an educator for all grade levels, but peer-to-peer (student-to-student) teaching can be incorporated for 6th grade to 12th grade students.
Program Components
- 9 stations with activities that are approximately 20 minutes long. Ideal for groups of 10-25 students
- Grab-and-go teaching kit for each lesson includes these components: instruction guide, interactive nutrition activities, food preparation, and active games
Topics included in Dinner Tonight Junior include food preparation, preparing safe meals, family mealtime, food labels, grains, healthy snacks, low calorie drinks, power up breakfast, and physical education.
To host a program, schools will need:
- Space for hands-on activities
TEKS Alignment
At this time, Dinner Tonight Junior is not aligned with TEKS.
Additional Resources
Interested educators should connect with their county AgriLife Extension office for more information. Find their contact information here: https://counties.agrilife.org/
To learn more about Dinner Tonight Junior, visit: https://dinnertonight.tamu.edu/