The Jaguar Student Activities Board is promoting sports like soccer as well as healthy eating habits during its Play for Your Health field day. The goal is to encourage kids to take care of their bodies.
JAB promotes healthy eating and exercise for families with a game-filled field day called Play for Your Health.
The Jaguar Activities Board has put together another event as part of the Family Fun Series. This time, the day will be a field day; there will be fun, classic games and prizes to win.
“The goal of this event is to educate young students about healthy living because this is not learned as much in school anymore,” said Annie LaForce, assistant director of programs.
According to Tiffany Burch, the family programming chair, the idea for this event came from the news media about Michelle Obama’s Obesity Bill. This gave the incentive to create an activity for kids to eat healthy and exercise.
LaForce, who plans on bringing her 3-year-old son to the event, expressed a feeling of obligation to support the First Lady.
Although the event is directed towards kids, Burch explained that teens and adults are welcome as well because healthcare is important for everyone. The main goal is to teach people how to take care of their bodies.
The activities will include jump rope, egg races, relay races, and healthy foods, such as “ants on a log” (celery, peanut butter and raisins), LaForce said.
Jaguar Activities Board member, Dominique Tucker, explained that Play for Your Health is important for everyone. Even though the event is great to teach kids, he said everyone can learn from it because it is so easy to forget. Students especially slack off on nutritional meals and ignore exercise during a stressful semester.
“With the turnout we have had with past Family Fun Series events, I think the turnout will be great because we have a lot of ‘usual’ parents that are excited,” Tucker said.
Tucker, who said the spring time is perfect to be outside, will be bringing his younger brother whom he has recently been trying dissuade from playing video games.
Burch also shared that several student athletes will be at the event, including basketball players, baseball players and cheerleaders. They will be there teaching and sharing how they stay active and healthy as well as playing games with the kids.
JAB members said they want to give kids a great experience and show them how to have fun with outdoor activities again.
“If this goes well, we will definitely have more plans like this for the future,” Burch said. “I hope people see obesity and its problems. We need to do our best to teach how to eat and exercise, and I would like to continue doing this, depending on the turn out.”
What better way to teach about health than hosting an event filled with games, nutritional food and prizes? A spring day with kids running around instead of inside playing video games is exactly the kind of vision Burch, LaForce and the rest of the JAB faculty is hoping for. Faculty and students are encouraged to bring their families to this health event where health education will be made fun.
This much-anticipated and fun-filled field day will take place April 15 from 6 p.m. until 9 p.m. at the intramural sports field in between the Science Building and JSAC. With a valid JagCard, each student can receive two refundable $2 tickets. Each ticket after will be $3. Tickets will be available April 1.