Enlisting and Providing Support

I am excited to be presenting my advocacy plan soon to the Childhood Obesity Taskforce meeting in my county. My advocacy plan is to educate parents, teachers, and community partners in my community about the importance of fighting childhood obesity through making better nutritional choices and exercise. We use a program called I Am Moving, I Am Learning (IMIL) at the Head Start program that I work at as a teacher. This program is an initiative of the Office of Head Start designed to address childhood obesity through increasing physical activity and encouraging healthy food choices. I would like advice from my colleagues about my presentation. Should I make handouts to go along with the presentation as a visual? I also wanted feedback about doing a song and dance with one of our "Choosy Cd's". Should I involve the audience to actively participate? If anyone has any helpful information or resources to share I would greatly appreciate them to help further my information on this subject. I have found several that was beneficial to my efforts. I used this one for my main presentation: http://www.choosykids.com/ and http://www.letsmove.gov/eat-healthy and http://www.letsmove.gov/get-active.

Blog Journal by Amy Carroll May 15, 2012

A great teacher makes a difference in each child's life, and affects each family and the future of us all.-Barbara Cage

The thing that inspires and excites me most about my advocacy plan and being an advocate is the chance to be a positive influence in the lives of children and families. My topic of childhood obesity is an important topic because it effects the lives of children and families greatly. It is exciting to be able to help educate children and families on the importance of eating healthy and getting regular exercise to help fight childhood obesity. It will help children and their families to have a healthier future when they adopt a healthy lifestyle.

I do have some challenges because I know it is not easy to change lifestyles overnight. My short term goal is to educate the children and families that enter our program to choose healthy foods and exercise by modeling a healthy routine during the school hours, but also encouraging parents the benefits of sticking to healthy food choices and exercise at home as well. The anxieties are also when they leave our program will they be encouraged to continue a healthy lifestyle. The schools in our community have a different set of rules that govern them than from Head Start standards. Some schools in our community do not offer healthy lunches and allow students to go through the lunch line more than once. According to some parents, some teachers offer candy as rewards. Also, some schools have cut down physical education to once a week for twenty minutes.

I feel that it will help me overcome these emotions by encouraging parents to stay informed and have a voice in their child's school. Parents should be helped with resources and materials to help them stay informed about the benefits of their whole family adopting healthy eating habits along with physical exercise to help fight childhood obesity.

I would like to encourage others to stay informed and educated about the issues that they would like to advocate. Having facts to share with parents and leaders will help you fight for your cause. I know that everyone is doing that after reading the different post. It seems as if we have some of the best advocates for children in our class. I have gained valuable insights about being professional and staying informed. I wish everyone the best in their efforts to help children and their families.

I would welcome any advise on my advocacy plan. I would love to hear from anyone on how to help educate parents and leaders about the important issue of early childhood obesity. This is a problem that effects one out of every three children and I would love to be an advocate to help children and their families to have strategies to help fight this problem in their own lives. Thanks in advance for any help in this matter.

Hello!

I'm ready to learn more about becoming an effective advocate!