Healthy Lifestyle Service Learning

Hours: 3 every other Mondays

Name of organizer: Evans Henry

Email: sesoir21@yahoo.com

Attendance=  Every other Mondays (on going)

The organization that sponsored this event is the Boys and Girls Club.

The goals is to teach kids to eat healthy food by growing their own food.  

My job was to plant seeds and plants in each pocket of the tower garden.

I also let the kids from the boys and girls club take some salads and radish home to make a healthy salad or a sandwich.

Me and my fellow teen mates from the boys and girls club thought of this project starting of winter quarter. A tower garden was donated to us, so we can start making healthier choices and change what we eat everyday.  Eating right and choosing which foods are mostly needed for your health can be challenging, especially for kids starting from the age of six. We thought that if we started teaching them about healthy foods at a young age, they will get use to eating healthier food and continue eating healthy as they grow. One of the main reasons we chose to do a project that included food is because food is an essential part of our lives, it gives us energy and nutrients that we need in order to survive. Even though this tower garden has not all the nutrients yet, we are on the right track of growing them. This project will impact the kids and their family by teaching how to live a healthier life and also teach them the importance of eating organic foods since organic foods contains fewer pesticides.  Doing this project also benefited me because I use to not care about what I eat and whether or not it is organic or inorganic, but now I started growing my own vegetables in my backyard and also choosing which vegetables are better for our health. The service learning activity also showed me how teaching others about health and science, and how it  can impact a child's or someone's future by instructing them the different benefits of simply eating right.

The foods we are growing in the tower garden includes vegetables, herbs, and fruits. These nutrients are beneficial to us because they give us fiber, potassium, Vitamin A, E, and C, and protein. To have a healthy and well regulated body, we need proteins in our system. There are many ways to get protein for our cells, and the one way we chose is by eating healthier foods with no artificial flavors added, which is why we start growing our own vegetables and fruits. This project will impact many people in our community because it will teach them the importance of eating foods that are not artificially grown. It will also help our ecology because we are not using any pesticides and harmful pollutants when growing our vegetables. Even if a person wanted to add fertilizers or artificial flavors using the tower garden, it won’t contaminate the soil on the ground since the vegetables are contained just in the tower garden.

Four questions that were raised during this service learning activity were:

1. How will parents help their kids maintain their health?
2. What are some effective foods that can grow on the tower garden that will be essential for a child's growth?
3. Which season is best to grow foods?
4. How long will it take until the kids get use to eating healthy?