The area of interest for the research paper that I am considering writing is on health, poverty and developmental delays. The first person that I interviewed was a School Psychologist. The insight that I gain from the interview was that health, nutrition, exercise, and poverty can have an impact on a child’s learning. If the parents do not have the income coming into the household how can they get the proper food for the children? If the children are not getting the proper meals this can causes some delays in their ability to learn.
The second person that I interviewed was an Educational Consultant. The insight that I gain from this interview was that there is a lack of knowledge when it comes to the parents. If parents are not knowledgeable about nutrition, how can they feed their children from all of the food groups if they don’t know all of them? Therefore, are the children getting nutritional meal each day? A parent needs to be educated about nutrition.
I can see a need to encourage and train the parents/caregivers on how important it is to serve nutritional meals and snacks to their children daily. Theses interviews influence my decision on which area to write about in that if children are not eating healthy meals and snacks it can possibly affect their performance in the classroom. The school now serves breakfast to all of the students before they take the ISAT or any state test. It has been stated that the students can perform better when they have consumed a healthy breakfast.
The area of interest that I am thinking of focusing on for the research paper is health. The related three specific topics are childhood obesity, nutrition and developmental delays. The question that I have for my colleagues is: What can we do to help people that are living below poverty level with the state of the economy? How can we encourage parents/caregivers that exercise and eating healthy is very important for our children?
Patty,
ReplyDeleteWhen I began working with a Head Start program I truly began to see what living below poverty can do to a child's development. So many of our children stay sick all year long because they are not getting the much needed vitamins and nutrients. When asked what they did at home over their evenings or weekends I often hear that they watched tv or played video games. At three to five years old they should be moving and having fun. Times sure have changed from when I was younger; we stayed outside until the sun was about the set and then we only got to watch television for an hour at the most each day. I can share some of the things that we have tried in the past as well as are in the planning parts of now. The first was collaborating with the local community college's cooking classes. They offered to come and help show families, with hands on instructions, how to prepare healthy and tasty meals. They met once a week for ten weeks and most often the children were involved with the entire process; parents learned that the children were more often excited to eat something they made. I bet having little cooking classes at your location could be a start if you do not have to resources of someone coming in to help with this. Most of the food was donated by the college but we also utilized the local fresh produce market, which is just a block from my site. Items that didn't sell that week were sent our way and the families got to utilize what was still good. Once the project was complete we asked families to each donate one healthy recipe and we made a simple Cook Book for all 60 families in our county (which is two Head Start centers).
We also utilize a Health and Nutrition curriculum in our classroom so the students are learning about importance of eating healthy foods and moving our bodies. We actually planned a monthly calendar for our In-Kind expectations (which parents must complete these hours as part of being accepted into our program). In-Kind is donated hours given back by participating in the learning process of each child; the federal government then see's this as an hourly dollar amount as time given back to the program. Anyway, we plan activities for the families to do and we ensure there are fun activities listed; going on a nature hunt and finding materials for collages, walking to the local park and playing for at least half an hour, dancing with soft towels, playing soccer or kick ball in the yard, trying new yoga poses, playing a game of keep away with a pair of folded up socks, and the list can go on. We ensure that materials are either free and handy and never plan something that includes an electronic device that will take away from the interaction aspect of the experience.
I hope these help!
Thanks this was nuch help. I got several ideas just from reading your post.
ReplyDeletePatty,
ReplyDeleteYou have some great topics. Make sure to narrow your topic down so that you won't have tons of research/information to go through. Writing about the importance of a good nutritional diet is great especially with the First Lady as her area of focus. There's a lot of research out there regarding this topic.