“Emory Strong Kids,” a club that aims to teach young children about maintaining a healthy lifestyle, was founded this semester by sophomore Arielle Schwartz. She now runs the club along with fellow sophomores, Kelly Dyer and Liz Andreas. Her Campus Emory was lucky enough to get the opportunity to sit down with Arielle and Kelly. Here is what they had to say….
Her Campus Emory (HCE): What exactly is Emory Strong Kids?
Kelly Dyer (KD): A group of Emory girls go to two, soon to be three, elementary schools in the Atlanta area and play fitness games with the kids. After that, we present a lesson plan on cardiovascular health, nutrition, or just maintaining a healthy lifestyle in general. We quiz them on the information, and try to make it fun.
HCE: How often do you visit the schools?
KD: As of now, we go twice a week. Once a week to each school, but we are working on adding more schools.
HCE: How old are the kids?
KD: 3rd to 5th grade.
HCE: How do you make your visits fun and enjoyable for the kids?
KD: We bring in candy, balloons, we’ll have them play games with jump ropes. We try to keep it varied…tag, relay games, kickball.
HCE: How do you integrate your lesson plans into the games?
KD: After each game, we have them check their heart rate, so that they can see the correlation between being active and having a healthy heart.
HCE: How did you come up with the idea to start Emory Strong Kids?
Arielle Schwartz (AS): My dad is part of the American Heart Association, he’s a cardiologist. He told me about the AHA’s mission to get college kids to start clubs at their schools that aim to reduce childhood obesity.
HCE: How did you get the club started?
AS: Over winter break, I was thinking a lot about what my dad had said and decided to contact elementary schools in Atlanta and see if they were interested in a program where we would teach children about heart health and play fitness games with them. I spent a lot of time on the AHA website, went to the bookstore to do more research, and began brainstorming ideas.
HCE: How do you think it’s going so far?
AS: It’s going really well, the kids listen better than I thought they would.
KD: Yea, the kids are really fun and entertaining too. We start off each lesson by asking them what our names are, and after a month, they still haven’t learned them!
AS: They call me LOL.
KD: And if they get our names right, they get a piece of candy.
AS: Finally they’ll get our names right, but if we stand in a different order, they mess it all up again.
HCE: Do you feel like you’re really getting your message through to the kids?
AS: I actually do. When we come back and ask them questions, they remember a lot of what they learned during the last session. They pay attention to their hearts more too. Often, when we ask them to check their heart rates after a game, several of them are already doing so. They’re paying more attention to how exercise affects their hearts.
KD: Sometimes, they have a little trouble though. Whenever we ask them what type of body part the heart is, someone always answers bone!
HCE: What goals do you have for the future? How do plan to expand this club?
AS: We’ve been going to the schools for four weeks now, and now that we have it established, we are going to work on adding more schools, and more sessions a week, as well as getting more Emory students involved. Also, we are considering starting programs like jump rope-athon at the elementary schools we are working with. Jump rope-athon is a jump rope marathon that both of mine and Kelly’s elementary schools participated in to raise money for AHA.
HCE: Do you have any final words about what you guys are doing?
AS: I guess just that our main mission is to educate people at a young age about eating healthy and staying fit, and to hopefully stop obesity early. It’s a rapidly growing problem in our country.
KD: I assumed that the stuff we were asking the kids was really basic knowledge, but they knew surprisingly little about the topic. It just shows how important what we are doing is.
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Emory chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.