St. Albert students convened with their peers this week to learn ways to build healthy, active schools.
About 300 Edmonton-area students rocked the Red Willow Community Church Wednesday for the 2014 Healthy Active School Symposium. It was the first time that the event, organized by Alberta's Ever Active Schools, was held in St. Albert.
Bouncing beach balls and wearing matching bandanas, the students were pumped up and ready to tell the world about how their schools promoted physical and mental health.
Active Healthy Kids Canada gave Canada a D-minus on its most recent physical activity report card, notes Kim Hlewka, event co-ordinator with Ever Active Schools (the provincially backed group behind the symposium).
"The more healthy and active our students are, the stronger they are academically," Hlewka says, referring to the latest research.
This conference was meant to inspire students to come up with new initiatives at their own schools, she continues.
"If it's their idea, they're going to take more responsibility and more ownership for it."
Healthy solutions
Bisset School students told the conference about their school's Bear Den program.
The program fosters student friendships by assigning each student to one of eight colour-coded "bear dens," says assistance principal Jason Michaud. These dens are cross-grade, include staff members, and stick with a student for their life at the school.
"Instead of doing activities with your class, you do activities with your bear den," Michaud says. You run laps in the Terry Fox Run for Team Kodiak, for example, or wear your Team Koala shirt on Pajama Day.
The setup gives young students older role models and lets seniors watch out for their juniors, Michaud says. Staffers constantly see students reaching out to help each other just because they're in the same den.
"It's created a K-to-6 community as opposed to just groups of classrooms."
Morinville's Notre Dame Elementary students spoke on how they used a school garden to introduce kids to new fruits and vegetables and teach them about how food grows.
"Many of our kids did not know how a zucchini or corn or different vegetables grew," says teacher Nadine Trenchard.
In order to change this and encourage healthy eating, the school started a vegetable garden managed by students and put baskets of free fruit in every classroom.
Trenchard says the baskets were a surprise hit, with many students building friendships by sharing the fruit.
"They absolutely gobbled them up."
The garden was also super-popular, as it was right in the middle of the school's hallways, she continues.
"They all go and smell the peppers in the garden and can see the sweet peas."
The school now has about 100 volunteers of different grades working on the garden and other environmental projects.
Doing so gives those students a sense of belonging, Trenchard says.
"They know that Notre Dame is their family. We help each other out, and because we help each other out we have the bounty afterwards to celebrate."
Student Nikita Proulx says this was her second time at the symposium.
Lessons from last year's symposium inspired her and other students to launch a healthy eating project at Paul Kane. They changed their cafeteria's menu so that salads were no longer more expensive than fries, for example, and put up displays with healthy eating tips.
"We're really trying to increase fitness and healthy well-being in our school," she continues, particularly by offering optional cross-fit and yoga sessions. Those sessions are now so popular that they're getting over-full, she notes.
"It's just amazing to see that at Paul Kane."
Ever Active Schools will check back on attendees in about a month to see what they've done as a result of this conference, Hlewka says.
