The Challenge to a Healthy Life

We started with the wish to change the mentality ”Food is tasty, time is short and exercise is hard” that exists in more students and adults all over the world. The needs we wanted to address were: low levels of physical activity for students and teachers, the lack of places where to be active, lack of time to do physical activities, few or no knowledge about healthy eating principles. Another issues we wanted to solve with this project were the low levels of active participation of students in school activities, and also no preoccupation and time of teachers to motivate, mentor and help students to learn by reflection, to have agency, to be capable of acting by themselves to make plans, carry out actions, make an informed decision based on their knowledge, and be flexible in changing times. The third need identified in all schools, from all six countries involved in the project, was the low level of active participation in the life of communities. We wanted to help students discover the ways in which they can take action and improve the community, respecting principles of sustainable development, through service learning campaigns.

Briefly, we wanted to achieve more students, more active and healthy, more often. We decided to start to build capacity for teachers to become active and to be prepared to motivate, mentor, and help students to adopt a healthy lifestyle. We wanted that participants gain awareness and understanding about the importance of a healthy lifestyle by participating in conferences and presentations on the theme, and practice physical activities and healthy eating habits, by participating in the challenges of the project or by setting their own goals. At the end of the project, we wanted for the participants to reach the WHO recommendations regarding physical activity and healthy eating habits. Also, we wanted that participants to experiment with an approach for personal development: set a goal, made a plan, and achieved the goal; to acquire knowledge for critical thinking and media literacy for the identification of fake news regarding healthy eating and safe physical training. We wanted to involve the students in community life; regardless the community is the school or the whole city, by organizing public events and building the safe routes, usable for all members of the community.

The main activity consisted of challenges for PA (physical activity) and EH (eating habits). Every month students and teachers were challenged to reach a goal for PA such: number of steps, minutes of activity, number of activities, distance covered by walking, running, riding. For eating habits, they were challenged to have a number of days without sweets or without fast food, or days when ate much fruits or vegetables, or counted the number of glasses of water, number of days in a month when they were eating the healthy dish (half vegetables, quarter protein, and quarter carbos), etc. Another activity consisted of courses intended for teachers to develop knowledge, skills, and attitudes for motivating students, time management, and reflection. Also, teachers involved in this project had some individual activity in order to reach a specific health goal. We organized mentoring activities for students with health-related problems, low levels of fitness, in general students who were reluctant to PA or who had unhealthy eating habits. Teachers created content for the lesson to be embedded in PE lessons and Counselling Classes, organized activities for students designed to know and understand the basics for PA (warm-up, intensity and cools down), practical activities with students to experiment new physical activities which could be performed with moderate to vigorous intensity. We organized Sports Events and made Service-learning projects to design and create safe routes to school, for walking, riding, and running in the surroundings of the cities. We organized Special Days at which were invited the students, teachers, and parents, cooking workshops (and created healthy recipes starting with favorite dishes and replaced some ingredients with healthy ones and also we recorded the making of cooking healthy dishes.

431 participants gained the healthy lifestyle status, an indicator (healthy ladder) which was computed based on the daily reports of participants, which were made on our platform (PDP- https://chl.cnlr.ro/), 36+17 teachers with knowledge about how to coach students (620 students) to achieve a healthy lifestyle (set a goal, make a plan and perform activities to reach the goal), 6 routes for doing PA, Several safe routes to each school, Handbook about designing a service-learning campaign for teachers, Handbook for embedding Healthy Habits into school culture= the calendar for schools, 6 guides: Step by step approach to... running, riding/cycling, dancing, outdoor games, hiking, healthy eating, orienteering -designed for students, teachers and parents, 7 Recipe blog - with recipes for students’ favorite dishes modified with healthy ingredients, one in each schools, in their own language, and one in English, one vlog, on the YouTube (video - recording of cooking healthy food), 4 types of lessons: with the objective: set a goal, be physically active, deal with fake news for PE classes and Counselling Classes, An online platform for monitoring progress of PA and eating habits developed during the project (PDP).