BEING BROCCOLI: STUDENTS TAKE A 'BODY WALK'

First-grader Lauren Goehring loves strawberries, so she was excited about "becoming" this red fruit on Thursday to see how it goes through her body.

Lauren and the 480 other students at Alma Schrader Elementary School got an insider look at how their bodies operate through Body Walk, a project of the Governor's Council on Physical Fitness and Health and brought to the school through funding by its parent teacher association.

The exhibit, set up in the school gym, used canvas tenting, poles and props to give students the experience of what it's like for food to travel through the human body. Students wore tags identifying them as a food item.

Brynna Downing was lettuce. While she said she doesn't particularly like that vegetable, she did enjoy the exhibit and learned a lot about how the body works.

"Students really learn a lot from exhibits like this," said Theresa Ladd, the nurse at Alma Schrader. The visuals and hands-on activities re-enforce classroom learning plus make that learning easier to understand.

Students entered the exhibit through large lips that led into the first station, a mouth, complete with teeth that served as seats.

The mouth was the first of nine stations that each represented a body part. Nursing students from Southeast Missouri Hospital and Southeast Missouri State University manned the stations, explaining what the purpose of that part, why it's important and what students can do to keep it healthy.

In the mouth, for instance, students were shown how to take care of their teeth using giant-size dental floss and toothbrush.

After being "chewed" by the teeth, the youngsters proceeded down the esophagus to the stomach. There, the children took their places on a food pyramid, which was used to show the different elements of a healthy diet.

Ashley Kramer was pasta, so she sat in the bread and grains group. Justin Hopkins was cheese, so he sat in the dairy portion of the pyramid.

In the intestine, the children turned over their food tags as it was explained that the food that was eaten by the mouth had been digested in the stomach and intestine and they were now nutrients. Judd Potts, who had a milk tag, was now a protein. Valkyria Helderman turned over her broccoli tag to see she had become vitamins.

From there, these little nutrients were sucked into the bloodstream and into the heart. The children got to see a life-size model of a heart, which is about the size of a closed fist, and were shown tubes filled with various thicknesses of gray "gunk" representing what happens when arteries get clogged with fat.

"Gross," the children sang out in unison when, in the lung station, they were shown pictures of lungs blackened by cigarette smoke.

In the muscle station, Sarah Garner and the others did jumping jacks to show how it takes strong muscles to move your body.

Why do you need strong bones, the children were asked in the bones station. "If you didn't have them, you'd fall on the ground like pieces of Jell-O," said Carson Miller. To keep their bones healthy, the children were told to get plenty of calcium and exercise regularly.

Children entered the skin station through a giant bandage over a cut and were told the importance of keeping cuts covered, wounds clean and hands washed to keep out germs. Plus the importance of protecting the skin from the sun was emphasized.

The final station was the brain, where Chris Nichols' eyes grew large as he squeezed a foam representation to show how soft the brain is. As instructed Austin Davis tapped his head with his hand to feel how a hard skull protects that soft brain. The children were told to wear helmets when riding bikes and skateboards or playing sports to protect their brains.

Another way to protect the brain is not using drugs and alcohol, the children were told, because those items can scramble messages to the brain. To demonstrate what can happen when messages are scrambled, letters on a board spelled out "ehelbthay."

When the students couldn't figure out what that message was, the letters were rearranged in proper order. The message, which the students could then read and which they seemed to have learned from Body Walk, was "Be healthy."