Making Healthy Happen

The Franklin County Extension office has two 4-H interns this year, me and Kerra Jones. We decided to take advantage of this fact for our special project, as two heads are better than one, and also we thought it would be a good idea to work on coordinating a multi person project and playing off each other’s strengths. We were both tasked with planning day camps for different elementary schools in Frankfort and so we decided to use these built in audiences for our program. Kerra is planning two days that will run from 1-5 I have planned three days that run from 1-3. We decided to do a comprehensive health program called Making Healthy Happen

After looking at the CEDIK County profile for Franklin we found that the major issues facing the children in Frankfort were health related. Franklin County is mostly urban/ suburban with some rural life, for the most part Franklin County is doing as good if not better than the rest of the state when it comes to income and employment.  The CEDIK report says that 11% of adults have diabetes, 33.1% are obese, and 27.6% are regular smokers. The statistics did not directly identify what the major issues for children were but it can be inferred that if these are issues for adults than children are also exposed and at risk for the same issues. Our program is going to focus on nutrition, exercise, making every day healthy choices, hygiene, and hydration.

We have decided to use curriculum from different programs including SNAP and Project WET. We also reached out to Public health professionals for guidance on the best types of interventions to do with children that are elementary school age. We decided that hands on lessons will work best. Kerra has created a My Plate icebreaker that requires kids to think and learn about what foods go in each of the food groups, this goes along with a lesson about portion control and reading nutrition labels. We will also be teaching a lesson about proper hand washing and how germs lead to the spread of illness. Kerra’s last day and my second day we will be doing a day all about physical activity. The kids will do an obstacle course and learn about burning calories, we will also have a short lesson about hydration and how it is important when doing physical activity. Every day we will be making a healthy SNAP recipe and explaining how easy it is to switch out a sugary unhealthy option for a delicious healthy one. For example when we do physical fitness we will be having fruit infused water to drink instead of a sports drink or juice which has a lot of extra sugar. Our hope is that we educate the kids enough so that they can make healthy choices and share with their families what they’ve learned.   

Our program will have a pre and post assessment so we can see if the participants learned what we wanted them to. The groups that we will be working with are general public school children so there is a mix of incomes, age, gender, and race, our target audience is children ages five to twelve so the groups we will be working with is perfect for our program. Kerra and I have collaborated and designed the program curriculum together, we are going to help each other present the materials at our respective schools but have changed some of the plans to best work with our audiences. We will have our first day at Good Shepherd on July 1^st and be working with 25 kids, the last day of our program will be July 26^th at Elk Horn and reach 50 kids. We are both very excited to see what kind of impact we will have on the Franklin County Community.