That Sugar Film is on SBS at 8.30pm this Sunday March 18th. Great springboard to integrate health and meaningful everyday maths! But if you want to integrate some Mandarin, or SOSE just to show that the fight against too much sugar is a worldwide problem, have fun watching this ad by the Singapore Government to encourage people not to eat too much sugar over the New Year holiday 🙂
‘That Sugar Film’ teaches us how to read food labels to calculate how much sugar is actually in a product. For every 4 grams of sugar, this equals 1 teaspoon. So it becomes easier to visualise that every time you have a squirt of tomato sauce (4.5g of sugar) on your chips you sprinkled just over 1 teaspoon of sugar on them 🙂 It also gets kids motivated to multiply and divide by 4, and comparing quantities over products 🙂 This ad does a similar thing with a couple of New Year Festival favourites. The big letters in gold tell us that:
一份鱼生 = 4茶匙糖 (yī fèn yúhēng = 4 cháchí táng)
‘1 portion of yusheng (strips raw fish) = 4 teaspoons sugar’
一杯汽水 = 6茶匙糖 (yī bēi qìshuǐ = 6 cháchí táng)
‘1 glass of soda = 6 teaspoons sugar’
一块黄梨挞 = 1茶匙糖 (yī kuài huánglí tà = 1 cháchí táng)
‘1 teeny pineapple tart = 1 teaspoon sugar’
Getting kids to calculate sugar in their favourite foods, can help them practice maths, make better healthy choices, and if they write their findings in Mandarin, they get to practice measure words, food vocab, numbers and measurements in Mandarin. Try doing the same as the ad does, and work out how many teaspoons of sugar are in your regular foods, then try reduce them! Kids can also do up a table, create bar graphs, or a visual representation of sugar cubes per serving of product like we did here, so that they can compare and shop for better options :
The transcript and pinyin to the Singapore ad is as follows:
糖恶霸 (táng è bà) ‘Sugar evil tyrant’
一份鱼生 = 4茶匙糖 (yī fèn yú shēng = 4 chá chí táng) ‘1 portion of yusheng (strips raw fish) = 4 teaspoons sugar’
哇太甜了吧！(wa tài tián le ba ！) ‘Wow how sweet!’
一杯汽水 = 6茶匙糖 (yī bēi qì shuǐ = 6 chá chí táng) ‘1 glass of soda = 6 teaspoons sugar’
汽水也这么甜！(qì shuǐ yě zhè me tián ！) ‘Soda’s also so sweet!’
一块黄梨挞 = 1茶匙糖 (yī kuài huáng lí tà = 1 chá chí táng) ‘1 pineapple tart = 1 teaspoon sugar’
吃多还得了！(chī duō hái dé liǎo ！) ‘Better not have any more’
康女侠 (kāng nǚ xiá) ‘Health hero’
还敢加糖 (hái gǎn jiā táng) ‘More sugar, how dare you’
化糖神镖 (huà táng shén biāo) ‘Sugar defeating darts’
上 (shàng) Attack
快给我吃 (kuài gěi wǒ chī) ‘Hurry, eat!’
降盐扫油灭糖斩 (jiàng yán sǎo yóu miè táng zhǎn) ‘Destroyer of Salt, Oil and Sugar’
去糖大挪移 (qù táng dà nuó yí ) ‘Sugar wipeout technique’
糖分油盐要把关吃得健康过好年 (táng fēn yóu yán yāo bǎ guān chī de jiàn kāng guò hǎo nián) ‘Eat sugar, salt and oil in moderation this New Year’