The weather over the Easter holidays reminded us all that Summer is on the way and this week’s Wednesday for Parents focuses on getting healthy as we all finally come out of hibernation and crawl out from under the duvet!
We were delighted to see our students arrive back after the holidays looking fresh and healthy after all the playing outdoors. One of our priorities in St Peter’s is to encourage healthy living amongst our students – mainly thanks to Paddy! Along with our PE sessions, we’re lucky to welcome Tommy, our GAA coach, in on Fridays. We also have weekly athletic sessions with Paddy, two sports-based after-school clubs and our latest addition, Cyber Coach, which encourages our students to get active with videos of dance and step routines.
Looking around the web, our first choice has to be Safe Food, who have a great website with lots of tips to get healthy. They focus on six different factors:
- Reducing portion sizes
- Managing treat sizes
- Replacing sugary drinks
- Making being active fun
- Less screen-time
- Encouraging more sleep
Although the focus of the Safe Food campaign is to combat childhood obesity, it’s also really important for developing healthy habits early on and for using nutrition to feel happier and healthier.
For teens, the MiYo app has recently been launched by SpunOut.ie. It’s designed to help your teen track their well-being by keeping a journal of sorts of the following activities: healthy eating, sleep quality, physical activity, talking to friends and family, learning and socialising/hobbies. You can read more about it here.
Finally, if you’re thinking ahead and looking for outdoor activities around Ireland this Summer, the Fun for Families section of Discover Ireland is excellent!
If you’ve any particular challenges planned for your family this Summer, let us know – we’d love to create a post of suggestions for Summer activities in a month or two and we’d really appreciate your help!
As always, you can find all previous Wednesday for Parents posts here.
11:43 pm on May 7th, 2014
Great post. Good that it mentions sleep and the app that logs activity. Some people get a lot out of logging their exercise on an app or journal. Good stuff.