Choose n Move

In Northern Ireland over 20% of children are overweight or obese. Choose’n’Move is an educational toolkit for 4-16 year olds that allows youth leaders to encourage children and young people to make healthy life choices in order to tackle childhood obesity.

The four key messages of the scheme are:

The importance of breakfast
The importance of keeping moving
The need to eat 5 portions of fruit and vegetables daily
That being active is good for your health

These messages help prevent obesity and encourage children and young people to make healthy food choices.

This scheme, co-ordinated by the Health Development Unit in Belfast City Council, provided an education pack which included activities, lesson plans and learning tools for these messages which are tailored for different age groups. The funding also supported the provision of vouchers for fruit ,and pedometers, to each group.

Aims and Objectives

The Choose n move programme aims to promote two key messages to children and young people:

Eat more fruit and vegetables.
Be more active.

These messages help prevent obesity and encourage children and young people to make healthy food choices. Obesity in children and young people is on the increase in Northern Ireland. Being obese is associated with risks to physical, social and mental health. It increases the risk of type two diabetes, it can cause low self esteem and it worsens the symptoms of respiratory conditions such as asthma.

Methodology

The choose and move pack provided information; games and activities that enable a youth leader to run a one hour Choose n move session based around the two key messages (eat more fruit and vegetables, and be more active).

The pack has been designed to target the age ranges of 4 – 16 year olds. The pack contains sample programmes for the different age ranges. However youth leaders can design their own programme choosing games and activities listed in the pack that will interest and motivate their group.

The Choose n move teaching programme has been divided into seven sections:

Introduction – to enable youth leaders to explain why eating more fruit and vegetables and being more active is important.
Games - to get the children and young people active. All the games have a fruit and vegetables theme.
Fun sheets - to expand the group’s knowledge using choose n move fun sheets. These consist of crosswords, spot the differences, colouring in, quizzes etc.
Activity essentials – Fruit and Vegetable Identification games, fruit tasting and fruit bingo.
Extras – This section lists ideas that the youth leader can use to expand the session. It includes activities like designing a healthy tuck shop to listing stories that can be told to the children e.g. The hungry caterpillar.
Feedback forms - Gather feedback and complete evaluation forms.
Information to be taken home by the children – this includes a Choose n move diary so the children and young people can record their fruit and vegetable intake for a week, a letter for their parents letter and leaflets on eating well and feeding a growing child.

The choose n move pack is supplied in a ring bound folder and has 116 pages of information and can be downloaded from the Befast city site.

Belfast also ran a pedometer challenge competition and have information and record sheets contained with the pack. A special section was inserted for 12-16 year olds. This section highlights information that this older age group may find useful. It includes things like:

cooking recipes
smoothie menus
ideas for healthy options when you are eating away from home
weekly menu plans
healthy lunch box suggestions, and information on food labelling.

Choose n move materials contained within the pack

In the pack the youth leaders are supplied with fun sheets, food diaries, pedometer diaries and evaluation forms, which they’ll need to photocopy these sheets depending on the number of children and young people in their group.

Other materials provided are:

Pedometers (x10) – To be used for the pedometer challenge or to get the children and young people to wear them whilst playing the games. They can see who’s taken the most steps!
Plastic apples and pears – these are to be used with some of the Choose n move games. E.g. Fruit and spoon races, up and over etc..
Fruit bingo game – bingo sheets, pens and bingo cards.
A recycled fabric duffel bag to put all the materials and pack inside.
Fruit and vegetable £10 voucher.

Promotion

We organised a project reference group which included members from uniformed, non uniformed and voluntary youth organisations. We also had representatives from different departments within Belfast City Council (Leisure and Community, Youth Forum, Food Safety, Health Development). And we also had the support of a Community Dietitian and the Food Standards Agency. This helped to get the support we needed to distribute and promote the pack. We were also able to get feedback on the contents of the pack and the materials we hoped to supply with the pack.

Resources

Choose and move received a Food Standards Agency grant of for the period of 2007/08

Evaluation

Leader’s feedback forms were included in the pack. These forms asked a range of questions about the pack / programme. Whilst at the time of writing only 13 forms have been returned they do give a flavour of the effectiveness of the packs. One question related to how easy the pack was to use on a scale of 1 – 4 (1 being not at all easy and 4 being very easy). None of the leaders rated the pack below 3. It would appear therefore that the pack was easy to use. Leaders were asked to comment on the various elements comprising the choose n move pack as detailed in section 1. These were very well received. – 65% being rated as very good or excellent.

Leaders were asked on a scale of 1 – 4 how successful they felt the pack was in raising awareness of being active and eating fruit and vegetables (1 not successful – 4 very successful) None of the leaders rated the pack below 3. The leaders clearly felt that the pack had been successful in raising awareness. Perhaps most importantly of all, all of the leaders said they would recommend the pack to other leaders. One felt that it should be used in schools.

Some comments from the leaders:

“Very good way to get the kids eating healthy food”
“An excellent resource encouraging children to eat healthily and take part in physical activity in a fun way”
“Good to have all the information in one folder”
“The kids enjoyed it more than traditional games”
“Leaders and children found it enjoyable and informative especially the fruit bingo which was bright and colourful”
“Great way to get young girls interested in healthy eating. To experiment with new fruit and veg”
“The fun way of getting the message across was right for the age group. Their response was positive”

The leisure services department offered family swim vouchers for each child that took part in a Choose n move session. This offer was only available when the youth leader completed and returned all the questionnaires and feedback forms.

The pre and post questionnaires needed to be amended as we initially aimed for one of each of these forms to be completed for each child taking part in the Choose n move session. This was too much paperwork for youth leaders to complete and subsequently a low number of the forms were returned.

Lessons Learned

As mentioned above, we only received a small number (relatively) of leader’s feedback forms and children’s questionnaires. Our expectations of what the leaders would return in terms of paperwork was too great. If we were doing the project again, we would probably ask for 1 leader’s feedback and 1 group questionnaire per group. The project distributed 500 resource packs (500 groups). This is a large number of groups and it was impossible to provide adequate follow up support. In future we would try and get funding for a support worker to manage the programme, provide support to the groups and to obtain feedback on the programme to enable a better evaluation to be carried out.

It’s important to release the packs when the majority of youth groups are still in operation. Ideally if it’s released by the end of August youth organisations are able to programme the teaching programme for the next year.

Future Developments

The Choose n move pack has been promoted at Environmental and National playdays. We also used these playdays to get a better understanding of children’s knowledge around eating more fruit and vegetables and being active. We used the pre questionnaire from the Choose n move pack to assess their knowledge. This demonstrated that children did have an awareness of the importance of eating more fruit and vegetables. However the majority still ate between 1-3 pieces/portions of fruit and vegetables per day.

We have also been in discussions with a major retailer and have put through a funding proposal for the following options:

Funding for 130 packs as we received requests for 630 but produced 500 -
Funding of one health and well-being officer to visit schools, youth groups, summer schemes, leisure centre to run and promote choose n move. Working with external organisations and also working on the evaluation.
Funding of £10 fruit and vegetables from November 2008 as our funding expires at the end of October 2008. These vouchers would be distributed on request and would be branded with logo and could only be used in stores.
Run a health day using the principles of the pack aimed at schools or youth groups.
Training sessions for winners of a design a health lunch box competition.

Contact Details

Contact Name: Tom Crossan

Email: crossant@belfastcity.gov.uk

Website: www.belfastcity.gov.uk

Organisation: Belfast City council

This case study was added on the 26 June 2009

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