W&J junior Jamie Seka helps elementary student Ashutosh Sharma work with a pulse-reading device.

The students pore over the data, plotting numbers and analyzing percentages. Peering at the chart, they use the figures to determine if the subject of their experiment is healthy or not based on his body mass index. Once a result is clear, they sit at their desks and record the information, their sneakered feet dangling high above the ground.

They are, after all, only between 8 and 10 years old.

The place is W&J College, where kids participating in the school’s intersession nutrition program for gifted elementary students are visiting the campus for lessons on living a healthy life. The outreach course, designed by Dr. Alice Lee, associate professor of biology, involves five college elementary education students working with 20 local children in grades three through five from the Trinity and Washington school districts.

Along with gifted program teachers, Denise Cummins and Sharon Thistlethwaite, Lee’s students created a set of hands-on laboratory activities, developed lesson plans, set up labs and prepared pre-lab presentations on subjects like “Sugar in Soft Drinks,” “Computerized Dietary Analysis” and “Body Mass Index, Blood Pressure and Percent Body Fat.”

“I think it is an important class because so many people don’t realize how much sugar and fat are in the foods and drinks that we consume. These kids need to know how to eat healthy,” said Jamie Seka, a W&J junior participating in the course.

Joining Seka in the class are W&J juniors Halsey Taylor, Brady McMahon and Marissa Capuzzi and sophomore Kayla Galbraith. “My students learn to hunt when a student doesn't show up, how to deal with unexpected questions and how to work with kids with very high rates of academic understanding. They learn what you do when the child picks up the concept faster than you expected,” says Lee. “They’ve never done this with gifted kids. They move fast and you have to have extra things for them to work on. This is the first time I did this with education majors. I was surprised with their creativity and their energy. They’re really willing to go the extra mile.”

The first week of class was a wake-up call, said Lee. Her students thought they were prepared for the day’s lesson, but found an error on an unchecked worksheet that ended up causing a few problems. Once they learned that valuable lesson, each one developed their own method of organization. For Galbraith, the
example isn’t one she’ll forget.

During a typical class, scattered around the room amidst the charts and scales are florescent green, orange and pink goggles and gloves – the only indications the pupils are children.

“Gifted kids don’t necessarily fit in the regular education classroom. It’s good they can get out and hang out with kids like themselves,” Thistlethwaite says. “It can be torture for gifted kids learning in the regular class. The teacher might assign 45 math problems, but if they already understand them, it’s like making (an adult) sing the ABC’s 45 times.”

Jacie Goudy, 10, a student at Trinity South, said aside from racing big blue caterpillars across the lab desk, her favorite class activity was creating DNA necklaces with different beads and tubes to represent each of its parts.

“We learned what DNA looks like and what types there are. We also learn how to stay healthy and what we need to eat,” she says.

Kids also engaged in activities that required them to document everything they ate for a 24 hour period then compare the results with how much exercise they did that day. For another lab, they separated sugars from soft drinks to see how much of the sweet substance was in each.

In addition to nutrition, the program also addresses child obesity, a subject Lee said is particularly important to education majors as rates of the condition continue to grow.

“It is a crisis,” she says. “The numbers are really very staggering.”

The National Institutes of Health report the number of overweight children has doubled in the last two to three decades – currently one child in five is overweight. Childhood obesity puts kids at risk for developing chronic illnesses like heart disease, diabetes, and asthma. Because research shows kids are eating too much food high in calories and low in nutritional value and spending too much time with television and computers and not enough time engaging in physical activity, Lee and her teachers instruct kids on the importance of making healthy decisions. The lesson, Lee says, is mutually beneficial to her own students, as college kids are notorious for their own bad eating habits.

“The freshman 15 has become more like the freshman 25. There’s no walking on campus, everybody has a car,” she says.

The elementary kids were tested on the last day of class when they all attended a special lunch in the college cafeteria. In the moment of truth, each was allowed to choose whatever they wanted for their meal while faced with a slew of options ranging from soda to milk and potato chips to fruit.

“Children have to learn to make the right choices. It’s okay to eat French fries for lunch, but not every day,” Lee says. “If they pick pizza and pop, that’s fine, but we’ll ask them to make a better choice for dinner.”

“That’s real life. It’s not about rigidity. There is no good food and no bad food. It’s the choices that you make over the week, month and year.” •