Wellness

Here at STEM we think it’s important to create content that makes a difference in our community. We find it’s important that when working we have a reason to make our work the best it can be. This could be getting out an important message to the public or it could be making sure we get experience in different career field that will us later down the road. In Wellness class we have practiced a lot of different ways on how to get important topics on how to be safe to children. We have done 2 different projects that try to teach this audience how to be safe using images and text to catch their attention. This year I’ve grown in explaining important wellness topics to younger children in a simplified and interesting way.

 

I first started to create content that would go out into the community and teach younger students about wellness when we started The Storybook Project. This was a project where we wanted to create a storybook aimed at 3rd- 5th graders. In this book we would teach them about a wellness topic of our choosing from a given list. We would create this book with a partner, mine being Ella Futrell, and with the help of our teachers. Ella and I choose to teach our readers about refusal skills. Refusal skills are strategies and techniques to help keep you say no to someone trying to put you in a situation that could be harmful to you or others.  The refusal skills we taught in our book were tell why not, use humor, and walk away. Tell why not is when someone asks you to do something that might be harmful to you or others you give reasons of why you’re not going to do that action or why it’s a dumb idea to do that action. To use humor as a refusal skill is to joke about an idea that could be potentially harmful to someone and make the idea look stupid and dump. When you use walk away as a refusal skill you walk away from someone(s) when they are pressuring you to do something that is a bad idea and could hurt others or you. In this book we had to tell a story that was interesting and appropriate for younger children while teaching about these refusal skills. We did this by telling a story about 2 cats named Kacy and Katy. Kacy was a good cat and Katy was a bad cat, but Katy kept pressuring Kacy into doing bad things. Over the course of the story Kacy learns refusal skills. In one scene in our 2nd draft Katy and Kacy are put in a cage for a month as punishment for being bad. After a critique from our teachers we realized that this was animal abuse and isn’t appropriate for children. This shows that I didn’t really think how kids thought. If I knew how kids thought I would’ve known that this might scare kids. This shows that I did not know how to present topics to young kids in a way suitable for them to learn. This shows that I needed to grow in making content appropriate and interesting for young children.

 

By the end of the project I had a professional story book completed with illustrations and a final plot. This book would be going out to Xenia Talented Academic Resources. After many critiques and revisions and more critiques and more revisions we finally had our final project. This product shows growth because the whole entire book had intriguing illustrations and plot points. For example, we had edited the part where the cats were put in a cage for a month and changed it to just a day. This scene also had a cute illustration of Katy and Kacy in the cage to catch the readers’ attention. This shows growth because the book had been approved by all three teachers demonstrating that it was appropriate and interesting to 3rd- 5th graders.

 

The second project we did was a Tobacco Prevention Magnet. This magnet was targeted at 6th graders showing them the negative mental/emotional or social health effects of using tobacco products.  Mental/emotional and social are two parts of the Three Parts of Health. The first one, mental/emotional health is how you deal or cope with your feelings, thoughts and issues.  Social health is how others perceive you and how interact with others. The third part of the Three Parts of Health is physical health. This is how you treat and use your body . To maintain good health you must keep all of these balanced and at a high level. We were not allowed to talk about the negative effects on your physical health of using tobacco because we felt that 6th graders already understood the negative physical effects on your health. We felt it was more important that they know either the mental/emotional or social negative effects on their health. I chose to show them the negative effects on their social health if they used tobacco products. I first came up with my slogan and image when we did an activity called “Magnet Brainstorm”. In this activity we came up with three images, corresponding slogan, and messages for what our magnets might say and look like. Once that was completed we pasted around our brainstorm sheet to get feedback from our peers. Our peers also chose the image, slogan, and message they thought were the best on our sheets. A majority of my peers chose my first image and slogan. My slogan was “Kiss a cigarette, Kiss your money goodbye.” My message talked about how smoking takes money away from your family, funds causing them to see you poorly. My image was of a burning cigarette walking away with a bag of your money. Since my peers thought this was the best magnet idea I had I chose this magnet to work on for the rest of the project. Over the course of the project we worked on making clear images, memorable, catchy slogans, and effective messages. My final magnet had an image of a burning cigarette walking into the distance with a bag of your money. This cigarette was on a bright red background so that it stood out more to younger children. My slogan was set in a large, bold, white font. My slogan was “Kiss a Cigarette, Kiss your money goodbye.  On my magnet the “Kiss a Cigarette” and “Kiss your Money” were aligned directly above each other in the same font size. The next line “Goodbye” was set in a font that was double the size. This showed growth because my slogan and image were bold and memorable.  This shows that I was finally understanding that when presenting messages to kids you have to be bold and simple.

 

These projects have helped me grow in presenting important wellness topics to younger children because they have helped me understand what is appropriate, interesting and eye catching. This skill will help me in the future because when I grow up I want to volunteer with young children with disabilities. I will need to be able to explain important things to them, like how to be safe in ways that are interesting to them so that they understand and pay attention.