Category: 45 Minutes

Body Composition

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Lesson Overview

Bodies get a lot of attention in our society, some of it not very positive, much of it focused on appearance more than actual health. This lesson helps young people understand different components that make up the structure of the human body. Youth will learn how eating and exercise habits influence how much muscle and fat each person has inside their body.

Instructor Notes

Before facilitating this lesson, you may want to review the following information about body composition. These facts can also be shared with young people during your discussions.

  • Body weight is the combination of muscle, fat, organs, fluid, tendons, ligaments, and bones.
  • The human body is made up of about 600 to 700 muscles.
  • Voluntary muscles attached to the skeleton allow the body to move, while involuntary muscles allow the movement of internal organs.
  • Voluntary muscles are the muscles that you can move by thinking about it. You can flex your bicep muscle by lifting up your arm and “showing how strong you are.” They are called voluntary because you can make the decision to do it, just like you can volunteer to wash dishes after dinner. Involuntary muscles are those muscles that work automatically; you do not have to think about digesting your food, or flexing your own heart to pump blood around your body.
  • Ligaments are tissues connecting bones to other bones to form joints.
  • Tendons connect muscle to bone.
  • Bone is hardened connective tissue that supports the body, protects organs, and aids movement of the body. Bones store minerals, these minerals are phosphorus, magnesium, fluoride and calcium, and are involved in cell formation. The body is made up of 206 bones.
  • The heart is an organ. It is also a muscle that pumps blood through the body.
  • The lungs are organs that exchange oxygen from the air with carbon dioxide from the blood.
  • Fat is unused energy.
  • The intestines absorb nutrition from food to be used by the body. They allow the nutrients to enter the blood.
  • The stomach releases enzymes that break down food into nutrients that can be used by the body.

Introduction

Show the youth the two containers (don’t show the inside). One box is filled with a heavy item the other a lighter item.

Ask: Can you tell what is inside? Both boxes are full.

Let the young people handle the boxes, feeling the differences in weight.

Ask: Do you think both boxes have the same materials inside? Why?

Explain that you can’t tell what is inside the packages by looking at the outside. Our body is just like these packages. We see the outside, but do not know what is inside. Each body is different. All of our bodies have: muscle, fat, organs, fluid, tendons, ligaments, and bones. All these combined make up our total weight.

Activity: Body Components

Looking at how the body is put together will help young people understand that everybody is different. Each person has a unique body and unique needs. Introduce 5 components of the human body.

If you have access to a projector and the proper software, use the the interactive whiteboard files to guide young people through learning about the parts of the body. In unavailable, discuss the following facts with the youth.

  • Your body is made up of five separate components, each of which has an important role:
    • Bones give you height and support your body. How many bones do you have in your body?  206
    • Muscles give you movement and strength. How many muscles do you have in your body? 600 to 700
    • Internal organs support life. Can you name some of your organs? Skin, stomach, intestines, liver, spleen, pancreas, heart, brain, lungs, gall bladder, kidneys, and bladder.
    • Skin keeps you together and your organs inside your body.
    • Fat keeps you warm, protected, and provides stored energy.
  • All of these components change with age and level of activity.
  • Two people could look alike on the outside and weigh the same, but be very different on the inside. Our eating and exercise habits, along with age and genetics, determine how much muscle and fat each person has inside their body. Eating healthy and being active helps our bodies in the following ways:
    • strengthens our muscles
    • keeps our heart, lungs, and bones strong
    • helps build the right amount of protection and stored energy
    • and helps our organs work properly.

If we eat unhealthily and are not active, our muscles and bones become weak, our heart and lungs have to work harder to do their jobs, and sometimes we store extra fat our bodies do not need.

Ask: What happens to your body when you get older (grow taller, gain weight, muscles become stronger)? What are some activities we can do to keep our bodies healthy as we get older? What are some foods we should eat to keep our bodies healthy as we get older? What kinds of food and activities could make you unhealthy and be bad for your body?

Conclusion

Point out that our human beings are amazing and complex! Encourage young people to try to make choices every day that help their bodies be healthy, strong and fit.

Continuing the Conversation

Hand out the Healthy Families Newsletter in English or Spanish so that families can continue discussing body composition at home.

Additional Instructor Resources

Gardening – Growing Goodness!

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Lesson Overview

This lesson helps young people understand where healthy food comes from. The youth will discuss what kind of plants produce their favorite fruits and vegetables. Then they will try out gardening themselves by planting some bean seeds and watching the plants grow.

Introduction

  1. Ask the young people where our food comes from. Give the youth a couple of minutes to share with another person where they think certain fruits and vegetables grow.  Discuss their thoughts as a group. You may want to mention the following points:
    • All food has to “grow” somewhere, whether it’s an animal for meat, grains for processing into flour and other products, or artificial flavorings made in a lab to mimic whole food flavors found in nature. Artificial flavorings and colors are used in some candies and flavored drink mixes.
    • It’s good to eat foods as close to their natural state as possible. Fruits and vegetables are the easiest type of food to find in a natural state. That means that not much has been done to them before they get to us. Foods that come in boxes and can be stored on shelves for months, for example, have been processed and have had things added to them to preserve them long before they get to us, in particular lots of them may have added sugar.
    • The sugar that is in fruits is different from the sugar in candy. The sugar in fruit is a natural sugar that is not made from many different chemicals like those found in candy, cookies, cereal and other sweetened treats, that’s known as processed sugar. Foods direct from the earth, no matter how sweet, are the healthiest foods for people to eat. So just where do our fruits and vegetables come from? Fruits and vegetables grow in many different ways. They can grow on trees like apples do, or they can grow underground from a root like a carrot. They also grow on vines and bushes.
  2. Download the interactive whiteboard activity from the What You Need section above. The goal of the activity is to match up the fruit or vegetable with the growing location whether it’s underground, above ground on the surface, or on a tree.
  3. Were they able to match certain fruits and vegetables to the type of plant they grow on such as underground, on a vine or in a tree?

Activity: Plant a Garden

  1. Talk about: Why are gardens healthy? Growing a garden can be beneficial in more ways than just getting healthy food. Gardening can help people relax. It can also be a time for family bonding if you work together in the garden. Gardening can even be a type of physical activity. Furthermore, seeds are cheap to buy, so why not grow your own food and save some money?

  2. Plant a mini garden. Have the young people plant their own green beans. You can split the youth into groups of four so they can plant one as a group, or you can hand out clear plastic cups to all young people to plant their own. However you wish to do this, you will need to handout a clear plastic cup (16 ounces) to everyone who will be planting seeds. Follow these steps for a successful gardening project:

    • Each young person or group will need to write their names on the cup so they know whose is whose.

    • Next use a thumbtack to poke a few holes in the bottom of the cup to let the extra water drain.

    • Once this is done, each cup will need to be loosely packed half way with potting soil. Make sure the soil is moist/damp.

    • Then place 5 to 6 seeds near the side of the cup so the youth are able to see them grow through the clear cup.

    • Cover the seeds with more moist soil to the top of the cup, and lightly pack it.

    • Place plastic wrap over the cups to help keep in the moisture, and place near a window for sunlight.

    • Once you see the beans starting to sprout, remove the plastic wrap and water as needed.

    • Continue to keep the cup in the sun.

    • The cups may need to be put into some sort of tray so the water doesn’t leak.

Activity: Veggie Scramble

If time allows, hand out the Veggie Scramble worksheet. Allow the youth time to complete the word puzzles, then share the correct answers from the Veggie Scramble Answer Key.  This worksheet may also be sent home as an enrichment activity.

Conclusion

You can keep the cups in the classroom and note their progress. This provides great informal, ongoing opportunities to talk about nutrition and health. Or you can have the young people bring plants home and care for them there. In that case you can, if you like, ask for periodic reports on how they are growing. Either way, once their plant has grown big enough, young people can transfer their seedlings into a big garden or larger pot at home!

Continuing the Conversation

Hand out the Healthy Families Newsletter in English or Spanish, which also includes these tips, so that families can continue discussing fresh, healthy foods at home.

Related Health Powered Kids Blog(s)

Additional Instructor Resources

What Kind of Sugar is in Your Food? Handout – (Russian) – (Somali) – (Spanish)

Know What Matters to You

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Lesson Overview

This lesson helps young people understand how finding balance between their values and what they do can help them feel healthier and happier. The youth will complete a Values Circle Chart and compare the most important things to them with how they spend their time.

Instructor Notes

Before facilitating this lesson, you may want to review the following information. This can be shared with young people during your discussions.

What are values? Why are they important? Why is it important for us to be clear about our own values?

A lot of people talk about “finding balance” in life. For adults, it’s usually work-life balance. For kids, it usually means having a good mix of school, activities, time with friends and family, and time to just relax.

What sometimes gets missed in this conversation is talking about values. Values are really the foundation for how we can find balance in life. If we know what’s important to us and make decisions about how to spend our time based on that we’ll be more likely to feel at ease, successful, happy, and well.  Most would agree feeling healthy or positive is better than feeling unhealthy or negative. This is true for people of all ages.

Another way to say this is that life balance does not mean equality, it means knowing what’s most important to you and doing the best you can to reflect that in how you live your life.

Introduction

Ask the young people if they have ever been caught between two things that felt really important to them. See if there are a few volunteers willing to share examples.

Explain that every day we have to make choices. Sometimes decisions are really clear and we know right away what we want to do. Other times we are conflicted between two or more good things, not a bad thing and a good thing. These are conflicting values. We are dealing with these all of time, often without us even realizing it, such as when we decide between a sweet treat we really love and something that we know would be healthier for us.

On a larger scale if, for example, participating in a sport I really love means I don’t get to do the after-school club that my two best friends are in, how do I make that decision and feel good about it, not make a decision and feel guilt or regret?

The answer for how to make decisions we feel good about all the time is to become more aware of our own values.

Activity

Distribute the Values Circle Chart worksheets and explain how they will use them. The instructions are provided on the worksheet.

Offer examples of common important values: family, exercise, health or career. Point out that more often than not people don’t ever show up themselves on the list.

Then explain to them that they should identify how much time they actually spend on these. Debrief using the following questions:

  • What did you notice during this activity?
  • What do you notice about how your values compare with how you spend your time?
  • Are you happy with what you discovered by doing this activity? Why or why not?
  • What’s one thing you’d like to do differently in order to have your life more in balance with your values?

Conclusion

We can feel happier and healthier if we choose to spend our time in ways that are more in line with our values. Remind the youth to think of the important things they wrote on their charts as they decide how to spend their time over the next few days. Suggest that young people hang their Circle Chart somewhere they can see it each day to remind them of their most important values.

Continuing the Conversation

Hand out the Healthy Families Newsletter in English or Spanish, which also includes these tips, so that families can continue discussing goal setting based on their values at home.

Related Health Powered Kids Blog

Knowing what matters can help you destress

Additional Instructor Resources

ChangeToChill.org by Allina Health

Stress! No Body Needs It

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Lesson Overview

This lesson helps young people understand the causes and effects of stress and learn some techniques for dealing with it. The youth will identify physical symptoms of stress and list some situations that may bring them on. They will learn some skills for managing stress and make their very own stress ball.

Introduction

Introduce the young people to the topic of stress. Let them know that we’ve all had times when our bodies react to stress and we can feel it. It’s the sensation also known as “flight or fight.” Our bodies’ natural way of coping with being frightened or challenged is to release certain chemicals into our bloodstream that provide extra short-term energy and alertness. Our instincts take over and “tell” us that we are facing danger and we either need to defend ourselves (fight) or get away (flight).

Sometimes when this happens we do things we didn’t think we could, such as run very fast or lift something heavy. We may also notice that our hearts beating harder and faster, our hands getting sweaty and cold, or our faces feeling flushed and hot.

Chances are everyone will have had many experiences of this. Ask for a few descriptions of what that looks and feels like. Young people might also describe feeling “butterflies” in their stomachs or having dry mouths.

Then explain that when this happens the options for what a person can do to respond become very limited because instinct takes over and we lose our ability to fully use the part of our brains that makes rational decisions.

Fortunately, by understanding what triggers our “fight or flight” reaction and learning skills to deal with it, we can learn to prevent some stress responses and calm ourselves down from those that do happen.

Activity: How Do You Know if it’s Stress?

Distribute the handout: Your Body Under Stress

Ask young people to each draw or write images on their “body” of where they feel stress and how they know they are having a stress response.

Don’t give examples right away, but if they need a little help you can offer these ideas:

  • heart pounds harder and faster
  • hands feel sweaty and cold
  • face flushes (gets hot and red)
  • “butterflies” in your stomach
  • dry mouth.

After young people finish the handout ask them the following questions:

  1. How easy or hard was it to think of ways your body reacts to stress?
  2. What are some of the ways you thought of that your body reacts to stress?
  3. Does everyone respond the same way?
  4. Are there good kinds of stress? What are some examples? (Examples of positive stress might be a performance of some sort, a physical challenge, speaking in front of a group about something important to you, and so on. Positive stress creates feelings of excitement, anticipation, like right before going over a big hill on a roller coaster.)

Activity: What brings stress on?

Complete the Stress: What Brings it On? worksheet.

There doesn’t need to be a lot of discussion about this worksheet as long as you process it at the end of the session as described in the conclusion. Do point out, however, that one way of both avoiding stress and getting better at dealing with it is to become more aware of what brings it on for you personally. This worksheet helps people think about and identify their own personal stress triggers.

Activity:  Make a stress ball

Introduce the stress ball as a way to help deal with stress. These objects are popular because squeezing the ball in your hand helps reduce tension throughout your body. It may be even more effective if you pay attention to your breath as you squeeze: breathe in as you squeeze the ball, breathe out as you relax your hand.

Let each young person make a homemade stress ball. Instructions:

    1. Take two or three balloons and cut the tops off just above the rounded area, so that all is left is the round part of the balloon. You will also need one uncut balloon.
    2. Take the uncut balloon and stretch the opening over the narrow end of the funnel. Have young people work in pairs so one can hold the funnel while the other fills it the balloon.
    3. Slowly and carefully pour about half a cup of millet seed into the funnel. The amount with vary depending on the size of balloon you use. Make sure it all goes into the balloon. Add more if necessary.
    4. Once the balloon is full to the top of the rounded part, without stretching the balloon, stop filling.
    5. Remove the funnel and tie a tight knot just above the round part of the balloon. Do not cut off the end of the balloon.
    6. Take one of the cut balloons and stretch it over the tied millet-filled balloon. Make sure the tied end is covered first.
    7. Continue adding more cut balloons, always covering the open end of the previous balloon first until you have several layers. This way if one layer breaks the seed will not spill out.

Tips:

    • The number of balloons you will need will depend on how strong and thick the balloons are. If you use good quality, thick balloons, you should only need three in addition to the filled balloon. If you use weaker balloons, you may need to use four or more.
    • With use, your stress ball will become dirty, so you can either clean carefully with very mild soap and water, or remove the outer balloon and add a new one.

Conclusion

Talk about how young people can learn to make choices that help them avoid negative stress, the kind that makes it so they have a hard time making decisions, the kind that feels uncomfortable and maybe even a little bit scary. Ask the youth what kind of activities will help them deal with de-stress. Some examples include:

  • taking a walk
  • talking to a friend
  • listening to music
  • meditation.

Continuing the Conversation

Hand out the Healthy Families Newsletter in English or Spanish so that families can continue discussing stress and healthy ways to deal with it at home.

Additional Instructor Resources