California Grown Food Tour
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GOLD MEDALIST The goals of this event are to increase the level of physical activity among students, to develop a greater understanding of the benefits of physical activity, and to increase knowledge of the importance of healthy eating. During this four week event students are challenged to walk or run on a quarter mile track on their school campus during recess and distance covered is tracked on a classroom poster. Students “travel” through 5 counties in California, and each county highlights a food grown there. Each classroom’s progress is tracked in the cafeteria. As each classroom advances to a new county - incentive items that support physical activity and nutrition are provided to the students. Upon completing the distance to all five counties, a classroom will have walked 350 miles and learned about a food from each of the five Food Pyramid food groups – all grown in California. Educational materials on nutrition and the importance of physical activity are shared with students. Fifteen Visalia Unified School District Elementary schools participated in this event starting September 11, 2006. Two hundred and twenty three classrooms, about 6,650 students participated and completed approximately 58,700 miles. This event was designed to motivate students to become more active during recess time as many staff had noted that many students were not active at this time. We wanted to focus on activity during school hours due to the fact that many students spent much of their after school hours indoors. The California Grown Food tour was originally planned for 4th - 6th grades but many schools expanded to include 1st - 3rd grades because they were out running with the older students. Another benefit was that those supervising recess reported fewer problems because the students were so focused on walking the track. |
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