Dear Parents:

Thank you for your interest in helping support our wellness efforts.  I will be sending home a letter with requested items I could use to encourage students to be well.  Please ask your child about the food guide pyramid this month.  My Pyramid activites can be found at www.mypyramid.gov.

-Mrs. Wheeler

Wellness Introduction:

I would like to introduce you to wellness in the fifth grade. It is my personal goal to maintain a healthy body, mind, and spirit. Not only do I try to practice healthy living everyday my prior job was with the American Cancer Society where I promoted wellness/cancer prevention to schools and businesses. The importance of maintaining a healthy being is also an important part of growing in our faith. Once a month I will create a fun wellness activity, Wellness Wednesday, for the children to participate in. In addition I will encourage the children to choose a healthy snack for school snack time. Healthy snacks in our classroom will be considered fruits (fresh or dried), vegetables, 100% juice, nuts, applesauce, string cheese, and/or yogurt, although I prefer your child to bring a fruit or vegetable. Elementary aged children need 5-9 servings of fruits and vegetables a day.   Getting started at school will be a great advantage for health and learning.

This year we will be encouaging healthy snacks in the classroom on a daily basis.  When your child brings one of the snacks stated above they will earn a SNACK STAR. For every 10 stars they earn they can redeem them for a wellness raffle ticket. Randomly throughout the year I will pull a ticket for a wellness prize. I hope you will encourage and support your child with healthy snacks. Below you will find some of the topics and tentative ideas for Wellness Wednesdays. Also, below is form to fill out and return if you can support us in any way for wellness.

-Mrs. Wheeler - Teacher Assistant

Overall Goals: To encourage each student to maintain good health through many wellness areas such as healthy diet, lifelong exercise and physical activity, personal wellness(hobbies, emotions, choices), and prayer.

* My Pyramid - teaches the children about healthy diet and set goals to eat a variety of foods each day.

*5 A Day - teaches children about fruits and vegetables.

*Physical Activity and Lifelong Fitness - setting goals for physical fitness for self and family.

*Stress - teach children strategies for coping with stress and ways to reduce stress.

*Prayer & Meditation - teach children about the importance prayer is to personal wellness through meditation, intentions, rosary, or other forms of prayer.

*Healthy Body - teach children about taking care of themselves overall through diet, physical activity, personal wellness, and spiritual well being.