Pryor Week 4 Journal

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Ashford University - California *

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Health Science

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May 4, 2024

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Running Head: PROMOTING HEALTH AND PHYSICAL ACTIVITY My Role in Promoting Health and Physical Activity Week 4 Journal Ashley Pryor ECE 214: Nutrition & Health of Children & Families Professor Shelia Thomas July 19, 2021

Running Head: PROMOTING HEALTH AND PHYSICAL ACTIVITY 2 Taking this course and reading and understanding the material have expanded my knowledge of developmentally appropriate expectations for young children’s physical activity. This course helped me better grasp why it is critical to track children’s physical growth. Physical health and development require the same, if not more preparation and integration. According to Groark and Song (2012), “In the early childhood education setting, caregivers promote behaviors in children that enhance current and future health.” As educators, we are role models for our students and they pick up language, habits, and actions. As children are learning new habits, it is a great idea to encourage them to move their bodies and make it enjoyable. It is a good start to provide children and families with the tools they need to help prevent childhood obesity and a variety of other health problems. Safe physical environments are critical to younger children. Undesirable behaviors and a shaky foundation are consequences that could result from either having developmentally inappropriate expectations or implementing developmentally inappropriate learning activities. When lessons are inappropriate in content or length, children become fidgety and sometimes display aggressive behaviors due to boredom. Giving children time for “brain breaks” is critical. Moreover, you create a shaky foundation with a lack of developmentally appropriate practices. If you are giving children letter sounds before they recognize the difference between a letter and a number, you create inconsistencies in their learning and the retaining of information. Having an appropriate balance between meeting children at their level and challenging them is crucial to success. Three new ideas learned so far that has been the most valuable to me are learning how to prevent and act against communicable diseases, learning how to make and implement allergy plans, and learning how to keep families involved throughout a child’s schooling. Having plans in place to prevent and react to communicable diseases keeps children, families, and staff safe

Running Head: PROMOTING HEALTH AND PHYSICAL ACTIVITY 3 and healthy. It also helps to prevent widespread health pandemics like COVID-19. In addition, learning to develop and implement allergy action plans gives parents a positive outlook on your childcare center, and shows them that the safety of their child is your number one priority. Also keeping families involved throughout the learning process shows them how to be advocates for their children, gives them resources, and builds a positive long-lasting relationship that impacts their outlook on schools and learning. Regarding decisions in my future role, this course has given me tools to implement with getting families involved and has shown me how to instill life-long healthy nutrition habits in my students. When creating the presentation about nutrition, I enjoyed it and thought it would be a great tool to use for a parent workshop or back-to-school night. In addition to that, I can now get deeper into healthy habits with my students on a level that they not only understand, but can take home, show, and explain to their parents. Two additional topics related to physical activity and fitness that I would like to understand better are how to integrate teacher-directed games during outdoor play when children love the playground equipment, and how to motivate parents to get physical at home with their children. I think these combined topics would give teachers fun ideas to implement that can also be introduced to parents and taken home. To enhance my learning in motivating parents to get involved in their child’s physical fitness I will take surveys to see what types of physical activities families do at home. After receiving results from those surveys, I can create interest groups with parents and see if they would like to do physical fitness challenges at home. One example could be a month-long cancer walk in October for Breast Cancer Awareness. Each day that a family participates they can send in photos of them walking and track their minutes and miles. At the end of the month, the family

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