Activity & Eating: Small Steps to a Healthier You

The project ‘Activity & Eating: Small Steps to a Healthier You' aimed at guiding students through the domains which have a huge impact on improving their lifestyles, changing them into much healthier ones. We wanted to equip our students with ways of keeping a healthy diet on a daily basis and instil them into their eating habits. The students’ needs were addressed by embedding physical activities into our project, as sport is a perfect means for involvement and motivation. Apart from traditional sports, we promoted the desired behaviour by making students realize that not only games and gymnastics are physical activities, but these can also be pursued by using various geographical features. Our project activities presented them alternative active ways of passing free time, which involved physical activities that are not often associated with sporty ones by our students. It also provided them with ideas about how to lead an active, well-balanced life which is not only important in their present situation when they find it important to combine being a diligent student and being a cool, trendy teenager at the same time, but also in their future life, when they will have to reconcile a working career with bringing up children and being an active citizen. We also wanted our project to appeal to students who were unwilling to attend classes or tend to skip them. They used to find school as a boring, unattractive place so we wanted them to perceive the schools as cool places to attend. The project eventually resulted in their more positive attitude towards the learning process. The project can be surely regarded as innovative since it tackled the aforementioned needs by establishing a holistic approach to them. We wanted to make our students aware that becoming a well-developed person depends on various factors which are often interconnected.The project was based on three pillars: Improve Your Health Through Good Nutrition; Exercise your local options; Be active your way.The main concept of our project was based on the theory of small steps. It assumed setting out small health goals in everyday life, monitoring own progress, building pro-health awareness leading to a healthy lifestyle-related behaviors. The main goal of our project was to motivate young people to improve quality of life. We expected our students to plan and carry out their personal healthy lifestyle plans. It was the tool to define their own way of physical activity, to find individually tailored forms of recreation and personalised healthy diet. Our intention was that the new habits would have become an integral part of everyday life. The assumed final result of implemented actions were the change of attitude towards physical activity and the introduction of healthy eating habits. The expected long-term consequences were the improvement of physical fitness, health condition and body shape, consequently a positve impact on total well-being and a general satisfaction with life. Carrying out the project simultaneously in five schools in different countries made its objectives more significant to our students as its European dimension highlighted its importance and enhanced their active participation in it. The project was carried out by five schools from the following countries: Poland, Italy, Portugal, France and Hungary and aimed primarily at their teenage students. The project had a positive impact on all partner institutions. The students increased their language competences by a direct contact with the foreign peers; by an on-line communication with their partner students, preparing common presentations and exhibitions as well as carrying out common tasks during the learning activities, hosting students from other countries. All these activities influenced their motivation for learning foreign languages as they were able to experience it in a real context. What is more, students enhanced their ICT competences by creating digital products. The project also developed their independence, discipline, creativity, positive attitude towards collaboration, team work skills and ability of succesful self-presentation. It created the opportunities to show and use their abilities and talents. It enabled to make new friends with peers from partner schools while building an attitude of openness and tolerance towards other cultures. In addition to the long-term pro-health and cultural effects we also obtained tangible results, such as among the others an informative guidebook ‘Activity & Eating: Small Steps to a Healthier You' the main product of the project, or a healthy eating videos series ‘Power up yu meal’. The duration of the project was treated as a kind of two-year trial period, which allowed us to choose the tasks, forms and methods of work most appealing to the students. Selected activities, tailored to the individual schools' possibilities, will become a permanent element in the educational programs of our educational institutions.