Program Overview
Background
Univera Healthcare's Fun 2B Fit. program is an award-winning, school-based healthy lifestyle initiative focusing on second, third and fourth graders and their families.
Recommendations
The elements of the Fun 2B Fit program were designed in alignment with recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the New York State Learning Standards, and from survey feedback from parents, teachers, and children who participated in a 12-week pilot program.
The CDC strategies to increase physical activity include parental involvement, role modeling, and consistent healthy messages. The AAP recommends calculating and plotting body mass index in children, encouraging parents/caregivers to promote healthy eating patterns by offering nutritious snacks and modeling behavior by making healthy food choices for themselves, routinely promoting physical activity, including unstructured play at home and school. It also recommends limitation of TV and video time to a maximum of two hours per day.
2nd Grade
Second graders will participate in the program element entitled It's Fun 2 Try New Foods, which includes taste testing where students sample one healthy Fun 2B Fit recipe each week for 12 weeks at their school. Students are encouraged to try the foods offered. Each week students will receive a laminated recipe card to take home so they can make the recipe with their family. The recipes include breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snack foods that are popular with kids, including Fruity French Toast, Lean & Lively Lunches, Tangy & Terrific Taco Dip and Tacos, and Banana Oatmeal Cookies. Schools can then offer the Fun 2B Fit items at lunch and promote the recipes to parents in their school, or district newsletter. The parents will already know the children have tried these items and will have the nutritional information about them at home on their recipe cards. In art class, students will create a decorated recipe box from a shoe box to store their healthy recipe cards for future use.
3rd Grade
Third grade students will participate in a 45-minute program including a physical activity lesson entitled Why It's Fun 2B Fit. Students and teachers, along with Fun 2B Fit staff and fitness instructors will engage in a workout developed especially for kids that incorporates easy, fun dance moves and stretches. During the workout, students are taught the various muscles of the body and their function, and discuss the importance of physical activity and how it can be made fun and easy to do at home with family members. We then ask them to go home and teach their parents, grandparents, siblings or friends the Fun 2B Fit workout.
4th Grade
The fourth grade Fun 2B Fit component involves an interactive field trip to a local Wegmans grocery store. The 'Eat Well. Live Well.' tour is a two-hour tour of Wegmans based on the Food Guide Pyramid. The tour is intended to be the first step in developing good eating habits by introducing children to a variety of healthful foods in a fun and interactive way. The Eat Well. Live Well. curriculum allows children to see and taste nutritious and tasty foods while reinforcing math, social studies, and science lessons for the typical fourth-grader.
Parents
The parents of all children participating in Fun 2B Fit receive a parent tool kit that contains a magnet with everyday tips on how parents can keep their kids healthy, a healthy family pledge to be signed and displayed in the home, a magnetic grocery pad for the refrigerator with healthy food choices pre-printed on each tear-off page, and other tips and information on how to encourage physical activity and healthy eating. Representatives from Univera Healthcare will present an overview of the Fun 2B Fit program at participating schools PTA meetings.
Fun 2B Fit program partners include Wegmans Food Markets, Inc., a 69-store supermarket chain with stores in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia and Maryland; Body Shaping by Sandy, which offers group fitness classes, personal training, weight-loss programs, and corporate fitness in the Western New York area; the Healthy Community Alliance, a non-profit corporation created to facilitate partnerships among citizens, facilities, and community groups to address health and human service needs which are viewed as priority areas in portions of Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Erie and Wyoming counties in New York state; and Lifetime Health Medical Group, which provides primary healthcare for nearly 100,000 patients in Buffalo and Rochester. A variety of services are offered at each health center and most sites include pharmacy, laboratory, radiology, internal medicine, pediatrics, family practice and specialty care.
