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Our perspectives may not be the same as our children and parents in our classroom.
When I was taking the ED. 135, I remembered one of the course taught me the importance of helping our young children to maintain a healthy and active lifestyle. I was sent to my classroom six years ago. Eighty percent of my children in my classroom were Polynesians. On average, 30-40% of the children were overweight. I talked to one of my mom in my class and informed her that according to our Growth Chart and the B.M.I. her son was overweight. I further inquired his diets and daily activities at home. She smiled casually," He is just a big boy! He has big bones. Ha! Ha! Ha!" I explained to her that according to our Federal guideline, junior boy is way over our standard. Staying fit and eating healthy and the right portion of food may not be our children and parents' priorities.
Susan Bernheimer shared on p. 99 in Reconsider Priorities. She pointed out that p.100 "the foundation of meaningful learning as emerging from life experiences of children." I ordered a bunch of footballs and basketballs. For the next few months, we spent a lot more time at the playground throwing footballs, basketballs and dodge balls. We had also made a variety of fruit salad in our Cooking class.
On page 101 Susan Bernheimer also pointed out in The Living Classroom. She also mentioned about how food helped to bond relationships together. During our monthly Parent Group meeting, I used some of our snack money for the classroom to purchase a large variety of fruits, low-fat cheese and crackers. I cut them up and displayed them in a beautiful platter. Ice water was the only drink. No fruit juice or soda. I invited the parents and families to come. Everyone commented on how sweet and crunch were the grapes and strawberries. I passed out the simple receipt to everyone to share.
Early Childhood education is alive! Our relationships with our children and their families should be changing constantly to meet their needs. Principles and fundamentals are only guidelines to applying to in our everyday teaching.
I think many parents are just not very informed on how to feed their child a proper balanced diet. One of the things we talked about in another class was about the birthday parties that parents often have for their child at school. The menu usually consists of cake, ice cream, candy, candy, and candy. There are other foods that children really like that are actually healthy. It is great to involve the children in making healthy foods and snacks so that they are more encouraged and willing to eat them. A suggestion might be to have the parents make something with the children rather than just sugar them up. The Internet has a lot of great suggestions and there are a lot so you can be flexible incase any of the children have specific allergies. One thing you could do is print out the recipes and give them to the families so that they can make healthy snacks at home too.
ReplyDeleteI know one problem I have is that the dentist told me that she has worked so many places and she has never seen so many cavities as she has here. It is really sad but not very hard to believe, I know many children who have silver capped teeth or teeth that are black in some spots and rotting.
I know that I am not exactly miss healthy but I try to be and trying is better than not knowing or doing anything at all. Do the children brush their teeth at your program?
I think it is great that you are trying to encourage a healthier lifestyle for you kids.
Hi Ivy,
ReplyDeleteYour experiences in conjunction with the New Possibilities text offer us a way to think about the teacher and family relationship. How do you think this relationship is developed? Are there certain things in the relationship that need to exist in order to discuss things like children's weight with a family? Also, how does the relationship between child and teacher contribute to the relationship between family and teacher? I wonder how your discussion might expand with reference to Rethinking text.
Jeanne