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The Whole Bite Club
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The lesson plan, then the notes for every slide. Print on A4 and take the second sheet to the board.

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The Whole Bite Club · Year 3 and Year 4 · Lesson 4 · After the visit

Sugar detectives

Students turn the acid-attack idea into a skill: finding the sugar on a real package, converting grams to teaspoons, and noticing when the serve size on a label is smaller than what a person actually drinks. Then they look at what the front of the pack wants them to feel, which is AC9HP4P09 in its most literal form.

Learning intention

In this lesson, we will find the sugar a label is hiding, and work out what an advertisement wants us to believe.

Success criteria

I will know I am successful when I can:

  • I can find the sugar on a nutrition information panel and change grams into teaspoons.
  • I can explain why the sugar in one serve is not the sugar in the whole bottle.
  • I can pack a lunchbox for someone else and say which of my changes helped their teeth most.

Guiding questions

  • Where on this package is the sugar hiding?
  • The bottle holds 600 millilitres. Why does the label talk about 250?
  • Who paid for this advertisement, and what do they want you to do?

Vocabulary

nutrition information panel · serve · claim · advertisement

Australian Curriculum

AC9HP4P09

Support

  • Supply the panels already photographed and enlarged with the sugars row highlighted, so the task is the conversion and not the finding. Give a grams-to-teaspoons conversion card. Pre-fill one card into the lunchbox as a worked example.

Challenge

  • Compare the same drink in two sizes and explain why the per-100 mL figure is the only fair comparison. Extension into AC9M4ST01 (verified): survey the class's drink choices and draw a teaspoon pictograph where one icon is one teaspoon.

EAL/D

  • The panel is a table, which is a text type in its own right and needs teaching as one: point to the row, the column, the units. Sentence frames for the justification. Every food card carries a picture as well as a name.

Disability

  • Cards are provided pre-cut on request. Calculator allowed for every student, not only on request. The pictograph extension can be built with physical counters. The game's slider has a keyboard path with arrow-key steps.

Exit ticket

  • How many grams of sugar make one teaspoon?
  • A label says 8 grams of sugar per serve. The bottle holds three serves. How many teaspoons of sugar are in the whole bottle?

Assessment of learning

The lunchbox with its justification is the work sample; the judgement is whether the student changed when as well as what.

Rubric line

Uses what they know about acid attacks to plan someone's day.

Working towards

packs a box and names one change

At standard

packs a box in which everything belongs to one of two eating times, and explains one change by timing or texture

Above

does that and explains why the same food eaten twice would be harder on the teeth than the same food eaten once

Inclusion notes

  • Ravi is fictional, and the cards are drawings, not anybody's food. Do not open, photograph, compare or display a real lunchbox in either band.
  • Keep the card set culturally wide and do not concentrate the sipped-and-nibbled examples in any one cuisine. Say once that nothing on the sheet is a food anyone should stop eating.

Resources

  • Years 3 – 6 Supporting Resource Pack
  • One real empty 600 mL drink bottle with its panel intact, for the hook
  • Enlarged photographs of three nutrition information panels with the Sugars row highlighted, for the support version
  • Printed Pack it for Ravi sheet with the sixteen food cards, A4, pre-cut sets available
  • One drink advertisement, print or screen, chosen by the teacher
  • A calculator per student

Worksheets to print

  • Pack it for Ravi · /downloads/3-4/pack-it-for-ravi.pdf
  • Lesson 4: Sugar detectives (PowerPoint) · /downloads/decks/3-4/04-sugar-detectives-slides.pptx
Oral Health Home · admin@oralhealthhome.com · www.oralhealthhome.com. Lesson text is reproduced from the Whole Bite Club teacher guide.

Sugar detectives · handout for the whiteboard

Teacher notes, slide by slide

The number beside each note is the slide it belongs to, counting from the first.

  1. 1.TitleSugar detectives

    Today we find the sugar a label is hiding, and work out what an advertisement wants us to believe.

  2. 2.Success criteriaWe will know we can do it when:

    The third is collected and it is one of the band's two summative pieces.

  3. 3.QuestionWhere on this package is the sugar hiding?

    Hold up a real empty bottle. Take guesses onto the chart before showing the panel.

  4. 4.SlideThe three rows that matter

    Point at each row on a real panel. This is a table, and reading a table is a skill of its own. Say once that the Sugars row is the total sugar: an Australian panel is not required to declare added sugar separately, so it includes the sugar that was already in the fruit or the milk. For every drink on the next slide except the flavoured milk, that total is very nearly all free sugar.

  5. 5.SlideGrams into teaspoons

    Let two students check the division on the board. Confirming the rule beats being told it.

  6. 6.GameWhole Bottle

    The child is given the smaller true number first, then guesses the whole bottle. The reveal is the arithmetic, not the sugar.

  7. 7.PictureServe or bottle?

    Ask which one a person actually drinks.

  8. 8.SlideServe or bottle?

    Not a trick and not illegal. It is a choice about which number to show, and noticing it is the skill.

  9. 9.Data tableNine drinks

    The caveat is the poster's own and travels with the numbers every time. The teaspoon column is ours, computed by the rule the class was just taught, and two rows differ from the poster's printed teaspoons because the poster rounds down: it prints 5 for the vitamin water's 22 g and 6 for the energy drink's 27 g. Confine the class check to the three rows that divide exactly. Read the water row last.

  10. 10.Slide6 a day, 16 in one bottle

    Attribute the six to the Australian Dental Association. Its own noun is free sugar and that is the word to use if you quote the policy; the class hears sugar, on the clinicians' ruling of 7 September 2026. The second bullet is the one that stops a student reading the juice row as exempt. Do not moralise; let the arithmetic do it.

  11. 11.QuestionWho paid for this advertisement, and what do they want you to do?

    Show one drink ad. Three questions: who paid, what do they want, does the back of the pack agree.

  12. 12.SlideFront and back

    Keep it analytical, not outraged. Students are learning to check, not to be angry.

  13. 13.WorksheetPack it for Ravi

    Ravi is not real and neither are the cards. Mark timing and texture, never virtue. There is no target teaspoon score.

  14. 14.Exit ticketHow many grams of sugar make one teaspoon?

    The two questions from the lesson plan. The application question is the whole lesson in one line: scale to the container, then divide.

  15. 15.RecapWhat we found out

    Then ask: which drink in your house will you check tonight?

Oral Health Home · admin@oralhealthhome.com. Prototype handout.

Where this comes from

  1. Policy Statement 2.2.2 - Diet and Nutrition · Australian Dental Association · Opened 5 September 2026. That drinks and foods high in sugar or acid are a sometimes choice for children, and that sugar and acid together are the harder pair on teeth. https://ada.org.au/policy-statement-2-2-2-diet-nutrition
  2. Facts about sugary drinks · Rethink Sugary Drink, a partnership of Cancer Council Victoria, Diabetes Victoria and the Heart Foundation · Opened 5 September 2026. What counts as a sugary drink in the sorting activities: soft drink, energy drink, fruit drink, sports drink and cordial all belong in the same group. https://www.rethinksugarydrink.org.au/facts
  3. Rethink your drink · Rethink Sugary Drink, a partnership of Cancer Council Victoria, Diabetes Victoria and the Heart Foundation · Opened 5 September 2026 · PDF. The teaspoons of sugar shown for each drink. The poster carries its own caveat, that these are estimates and formulations change, and that caveat travels with the figures wherever they appear. https://www.rethinksugarydrink.org.au/downloads/darebin-sugary-drinks.pdf
  4. Healthy diet · World Health Organization · Opened 5 September 2026. The free-sugars ceiling as a share of what a person eats in a day, which is where the teaspoon arithmetic in the drinks lessons starts. It publishes no separate figure for children, which is why the six teaspoons are attributed to the dental association instead. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/healthy-diet
  5. Sugar labelling · Food Standards Australia New Zealand · Opened 5 September 2026. What the Sugars row on an Australian panel is: the total, counting both the sugar already in the food and the sugar added to it. It is the regulator's own statement of the requirement the lesson teaches students to read. https://www.foodstandards.gov.au/consumer/labelling/Sugar-labelling
  6. Proposal P1058 - Nutrition labelling about added sugars · Food Standards Australia New Zealand · Opened 5 September 2026. That an Australian panel still need not break added sugar out on its own line, and when that was last decided. The proposal to require it was assessed and closed on 23 March 2026, leaving the total-sugars declaration as it was. https://www.foodstandards.gov.au/food-standards-code/proposals/Proposal-P1058-Nutrition-labelling-about-added-sugars