Wellness+10

The first project of the year was the Wellness Plan. This project was limited to Wellness and Fitness class. It was a project to show how the students were going to improve their total health over the first semester in a creative way. The plan needed to include long-term and short-term goals.

The purpose of the project was to get everyone in shape by end of the semester. We needed to have an overall goal for our wellness to be completed by the end of the semester, which needed to be approved by Ms. Tash. We needed to improve upon our state of health at the beginning of the school year, which was extremely important. It was important to become healthier people by the end of the semester, because we were not too healthy at the beginning of the semester. A healthier person is a happy person.

We needed several goals included in the plan, and the steps to get there. The steps to the long-term goal were the short-term goals. The steps to the short-term goals were individual steps, like one of mine was to avoid fast food. We also had to include barriers that would stop us from achieving our goals. In order to find ways around the barriers, we had to list them.

The best thing that I learned during this project is what it takes to lose some weight. I am very glad that I learned this because it helped me to lose a total of 30 lbs as of 12/19/2012. This gives me much joy!

My biggest struggle during the project was getting through the creativity issue. How would someone be able to tell that the Wellness Plan was mine, but without my name being on it? Obviously, creativity is not my forte, and unfortunately for me, it was part of the rubric.

The beginning of the Wellness plan was to form the goals. Once the goals were formed, a rough draft was made using paper. Once the rough draft was completed, Ms. Tash gave feedback, and improvements were made. Once the improvements were made, the final draft was formed on a large poster.

The quality that I used most in the Wellness plan was inquiry. I needed to figure out how I could improve my health before I could set any goals. The next thing to figure out was how to go out with the old and in with the new goals. Some of the goals that I said I would accomplish were very difficult compared to my life at the time. In this case, I would say that the definition of inquiry is to ask questions on how to accomplish goals and act on the answers.

Another project based mostly in Wellness and Fitness was the Cookbook. The scientific principles in the latter half of the book were created in biology class. To read about their creation, click the Biology link in the left sidebar.

The purpose of the project was to help reduce the rate of obesity. We needed to have two recipes per person in every group cookbook, with the exception of one student who only needed to prepare one recipe. The cookbook was the final project in the Wellness unit on obesity.

One of the things that was most needed to have a clear and concise cookbook was a theme. My group decided that the cookbook should be marketed to children, so a Super Hero theme was decided upon. We chose this because we believed that eating habits are made during the first few years in life, so they must be healthy.

The best thing about this project was that I learned how to make recipes healthier without sacrificing taste. I learned how to make regular spaghetti have more than double the fiber and fewer calories by using whole wheat spaghetti. Spaghetti is one of my favorites, so the newly learned recipes are very helpful.

The biggest struggle during the cookbook was making everything consistent. If even one colon was out of place on a slide, another revision had to be made. Usually, every one of the slides needed to be revised if a mistake or inconsistency was found, so this was definitely the most frustrating part of making the book.

In order to make the cookbook, everyone needed to fnd their recipes. We first found regular recipes that weren't very healthy and modified them. Once the recipes were modified, everyone made their recipes at home and took pictures of them. With recipes cooked and pictures taken, the cookbook was ready to be assembled. All of the recipes were put on PowerPoint slides, along with the scientific principles from Biology. Once dozens of revisions were done to make the cookbook entirely and thoroughly consistent, it was complete.

Overwhelmingly, persistence was used the most during the cookbook project. The majority of the persistence was used during the dozens of miniscule revisions that were done to make the entire cookbook consistent. I also used persistence during the cooking segment of the project. I had to commit weekends to this project in order to proffesionally cook and photograph the recipes.

I also needed to use a lot of creativity. Not just in the design of the overall cookbook, but in the names of the recipes. There was also the issue of the table of contents. It seemed to be so difficult to make a table of contents that was easy to follow. I decided to be creative and make a rainbow of colors in the table of contents, so that every recipe has a different color than the previous. On a black and white dotted background, I found this to be fairly easy to follow.