Health Field Days

“The physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake” a quote made by the First Lady, Michelle Obama, as she launches her comprehensive initiative to change the way children think about nutrition and physical fitness (“Learn the Facts,” 2010). Three decades ago, children lived active lives that kept them healthier. They walked to and from school, ate home cooked, reasonable portion meals with vegetables and played outdoors most of the time. Today, children ride the bus instead of walk, eat more fast food and snacks throughout the day because parents are busier, and watch more television or play video games rather than be active outside with peers (“Learn the Facts,” 2010). Young children are becoming overweight and obese along with being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes more frequently. They are making poor dietary choices, inadequate physical activity, and spending too much screen time all contributing to the obesity crisis. One of the effective solutions to reversing the trend of childhood obesity is to provide safe, affordable and accessible after-school health and physical fitness educational programs for all school ages across the nation.

Given the lack of nutrition education and limited physical education in the nation’s schools, the Energize program filled a void in the elementary school experience. Children who participated in the study appeared to enjoy learning due to the promising approach of teaching nutrition knowledge and skills through engaging teaching strategies that facilitate physical activity. In addition, students were empowered to make better choices for themselves and to share the information with their families.

School lunches, curriculum focus, and daily activities have changed in elementary schools over the years. The nutritional value in school lunches often meet a bare minimum. Curriculum is focused strongly on idealistic future careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics; but often forget teaching basic healthy habits needed for lifelong health. Physical education is no longer required every single day. Obesity has become an epidemic and not just for adults, it is increasingly affecting children as well. Children spend a generous amount of time in the classroom. They spend more time in school than at home or anywhere else. Therefore, schools have a responsibility in preventing obesity in adolescents by teaching them healthy habits, serving them nutritious food, and providing them with adequate physical activity.

The program is to address the children about obesity and also to the community. Policy can affect these elementary students by giving them better opportunity to have healthy ways rather than having more risk of getting obesity. People can modify the various risk factors into protective factors by having a change in policy. School board in Oakland can change their policy about physical activity by including P.E. classes, intramural sports for students to attend so that they can be physically active. Even outside of school, some children have little or no access to a place where they can be active. The community can petition for more parks around the neighborhood, where the city hall can produce a policy leading to creation of parks and protecting

Schools can play an active role in obesity prevention through focusing on healthy eating and active lifestyle in their curriculum (Hardy, Farrell & King, 2007). Teachers educate students about the importance of healthy lifestyles in the key learning area of PDHPE. Health and Physical Education (HPE) is also a core subject in new K-10 Australian Curriculum. Both the K-6 PDHPE and K-10 HPE syllabuses incorporate outcomes and content that explicitly addresses healthy eating and physical activity. PDHPE has such an important role in the curriculum as it provides students with the education they need to adopt lifelong healthy, active

The issue of obesity has been ongoing in the American society for over a decade and there is much that can be done to fix it. As the great businessman Richard Attias said, “Obesity is a problem that nearly every nation in the world is facing, but there is much that we can do to fix it” (Attais). With very little progress being made to stop or slow it down in the present time, the focus should be shifted towards the future. America’s younger generation should be taught about health, nutrition and preventing major weight gain. Adding lessons and classes to the American public school system that pertain to these subjects would greatly benefit our society in the future. Educating students about nutrition and physical activities will make them more aware about their health and staying healthy. This will cause students to be more proactive by eating healthier and exercising frequently. As a result, there will be a decrease in obesity in our society as the younger generation grows up.

The schools play an important part in the health of a child, there in schools they learn how to be active, eat healthy, and some schools districts provide a great program fun and fitness, but unfortunately, not all kids that need it participate in those programs, due to the lack of information to the parents.

Currently, at many schools, PE is compulsory until year 11, but only 2 lessons a week, it isn’t enough! Compulsory Nutritional, health and PE lessons could be brought into the curriculum as an assessed class-room subject, PE, and many afterschool programs should become available for students to learn new skills that will help them maintain a healthy lifestyle, also parents could become more involved and learn about the risks of what they’re feeding their children. As well as teaching health, nutrition and PE messages, school PE should mainly focus on getting students involved in regular and fun activities. The education system can also promote healthy lifestyles outside of the classroom, by closely working with students to give them higher opportunity’s to eat better foods and stay active.

The goal of this program was to prevent Type 2 Diabetes as well as reduce childhood obesity and the among Kahnawake residents. The project developed a health education curriculum for children, strengthened the school’s nutrition policy to create supportive environments for healthy eating in the school, and provided a program of classroom and school activities to promote healthy lifestyles for parents, teachers, and children throughout the school year. To follow up and support what the children learned in class, a year-long program of community activities that included walking clubs, cooking courses and community gardens was initiated (Willows, Hanley, & Delormier,

Healthier Tenet’s for Tomorrow targets children within the Dallas Independent School District, as to attack this issue, you need to aim your efforts at the base of the fire. By becoming role models and advocates for this change through programs that offer healthy ways in which to teach the next generation how to care for themselves properly, we can make a difference. We seek to teach children that exercise can be fun and eating healthy can also be delicious. Our program to partner with the DISD would give parents the tools they need to easily teach their children the value of proper diet and

The usual time frame for this evaluation is 6 months to 2-3 years”.4 The obesity prevention after-school program at the two different schools are to help children further their understanding the importance of physical exercise and food choices such as eating more vegetables and fruits than fatty and unhealthy foods. The methods that this program did was recruited young elementary children into two categories: the intervention and the comparison group that age ranged from 4-9 years old. The evaluators made the sample size small of 46 young elementary students and the parents and/or guardians were involved throughout the program for ethical purposes. The instruments that they used were motivational interviewing with a coach, using the Traffic Light method, and brief surveys that were filled out by the children, identifing where their knowledge and understanding of eating healthy and importance of exercise

This is a Community Teaching Plan Work Proposal group project for the city of San Diego, and our target community is children in elementary school. We have chosen primary health promotion/prevention and will address Childhood Obesity, which falls under the category of Nutrition and Weight Status in Healthy People 2020.

Upon reviewing the community vitality data I came to the conclusion that the health problem that a health education program would be most appropriate to address would be childhood nutritional health and fitness. I came to this conclusion after careful data analysis. Of the county’s adults (18+) 77% ate less than five servings of fruits and vegetables per day, this percentage is so high likely because of attitudes and habits these adults picked up when they were children. The second largest age demographic in the county is children aged 10 to 17 are overweight, six percent more than the state average, 88% of children age 10 to 17 are not meeting daily targets for fruit and vegetable consumption and 30% age 10 to 17 watch 3 or

. A systemic review by Van Cauwenberghe (2010) reported that multicomponent programs which engage both children and their families in the intervention resulted in larger improvements in fruit and vegetable intake than single component programs. However, the authors acknowledged that these multicomponent require may be difficult to replicate due to considerable resources such as manpower, funds and time that are required to implement the programing. Project FIT, an example of a successful multicomponent program, demonstrated increased healthful eating by using both school, parent, and community based initiatives. The school based initiative focused on the student’s nutrition and physical exercise program components. Parental involvement was solicited to support their children’s healthful eating and physical activity behaviors. A third component included community based initiatives that focused on increasing access to affordable healthy foods and places for physical activity. Project FIT used

My emphasis in this assignment is to develop, implement, and assess a teaching plan concentrated on good nutrition and daily exercise for school age children. The early years are a critical time for founding good eating habits and attitude about food and exercise. Children who are obese are more likely to be obese as adults. This is a major public health risk to the wellbeing of children. Recent literature supports the positive effects of good nutrition on the brain development and mental health. Limited exercise in