Building Stonger, Healthier Bodies

Health education will be incorporated into physical education classes for 7th grade students. Our goal, this year, is to build more muscle while learning how to eat healthier and become more active.  Students will learn about dynamic stretching and how to use their own body to build muscle.  Students will be working together to devise a playground fitness program, learn about lifetime fitness activities, and other various aspects of health.

STRESS!

Students learned what causes stress, but more importantly, how to deal with it.  At the end of the unit, each student made their own stress ball.  To make one for yourself follow these directions.
1. Put 1/4 c. flour into a dry, empty water bottle.
2. Put a 9" or slightly larger balloon on top of the water bottle.
3.  Squeeze the bottle slightly, to inflate the balloon a little, then turn the water bottle over.
4.  empty all the flour into the balloon by shaking and squeezing the bottle.
5.  Remove balloon from the bottle and make sure all the air is out of the balloon.
6.  Tie the end and decorate with a face and hair, if desired.
7.  Relieve stress!

Red Ribbon Week

In honor of Red Ribbon Week, students decorated their homeroom doors with anti-drug slogans.  In class, they learned about the effects that drugs & alcohol can have on a person, ways to remain drug free, and how to make a good decision.  Here are a few of the slogans they came up with.  As part of Red Ribbon Week, students were allowed to "dress like their door."

First Week of Health

The 6th and 7th grade have just finished their first week of health education.  The first topic we're covering is Nutrition.  In the first week, students have learned about the food pyramid and how many servings of each of the 5 food groups they should be getting.  The food groups are fruit, vegetable, milk, meat & beans and grain.  Students kept track of everything they ate for 4 days, then tracked how many servings of each food group they consumed.  One of the greatest trends we noticed is that may students are not eating breakfast before they come to school.  A breakfast that includes whole wheat grain and a small amount of protein will last the student through the morning and jumpstart their system. 

According to Dr. Alvin Poussaint, childhood obesity increased from 5 percent in 1964 to about 13 percent in 1994. Today, it is about 20 percent – and rising.

Excessive time spent watching television, using the computer, and playing video games is partly to blame for this escalating rate. Children, on average, spend up to five to six hours a day involved in these sedentary activities. Perhaps it wouldn't matter if they were sufficiently active at other times, but most of them aren't.

To make matters worse, children are bombarded with well-crafted TV ads from fast-food chains and other purveyors of high-fat, high-sugar meals and snacks. A recent study reported that two-to-six-year-olds who watch television are more likely to choose food products advertised on TV than children who do not watch such commercials. These highly effective advertising campaigns, combined with a physically inactive lifestyle, have produced a generation of kids who are at high risk for obesity-associated medical conditions.

 

What Parents Can Do
When children are spending most of their free time sitting in front of televisions and computers, they are not outside running, jumping or engaging in team sports that would keep their weight down. Parents need to set limits on the time their children are engaged in passive activities. Pediatricians recommend restricting children to one to two hours per day on TV and computers combined – though older children may need additional time for learning activities.
Parental involvement remains the most important key to our children's healthy diets. Programs to educate parents about nutrition are essential. Fast foods should be consumed only in moderation. Caregivers, who are often busy and harried, must avoid the temptation to whisk their kids into fast-food restaurants or to pick up fast food for dinner at home. Changing eating habits and lifestyles is not easy, but the health benefit for our children is a wonderful payoff for parents willing to take on the task.
Here are important things parents can do to curtail the obesity epidemic among children:

• Limit TV viewing and time on the computer to one or two hours per day.
• Encourage participation in physical activity and sports.
• Curtail visits to fast-food restaurants.
• Provide nutritious, well-balanced, low-calorie, and low-fat meals.
• Limit the availability of high-fat and high-sugar snacks in your home.