The Säjai® Foundation, NRPA and the City of St. Paul Parks and Recreation Division participated in a pod cast interview to discuss the Wise Kids® program. Learn more about the program and its goals as well as St. Paul's successful experience with the program.
Click here to follow the link to this downloadable interview.
Wise Kids®
This exciting 9-week wellness program introduces the concept of Energy Balance and explores how it works through Energy IN lessons about the Food Pyramid, the importance of calories, and beginning exploration of food labels. Energy Out lessons explore the heart as your body’s engine, body composition, and the importance and types of activity.
Each lesson follows a Learn-Do-Play format, offering activities to let children learn the concepts, then apply what they’ve learned to their everyday life. The physical activity component provides 30 minutes of structured activity that supports concepts and encourages all children to participate. Energy IN and Energy OUT challenges give children goals for better eating and activity behaviors. Research has proven its success in educating kids about wellness as well as changing their attitudes, values, and behaviors towards healthy living.
The Säjai® Foundation is committed to measuring program impact. We have partnered with the University of Minnesota to evaluate the Wise Kids® pilot program in St. Paul, Minn. Learning from this program has been incorporated into our program’s design and used to develop an on-going evaluation tool for communities to track impact on children in their program.
We are excited to announce that research results show that the Wise Kids program has positive impact on participating children! Specifically, attitudes, norms and behaviors for healthy eating and activity were positively impacted. And, children’s BMI (body mass index) improved when compared to the control group. Click here to read the full research executive summary.
