With the growing trend in obesity in Waupaca County and the lower income statuses of many of our county’s residents, our team felt that it was necessary to develop a healthy eating initiative to help young students develop a wider perspective on alternative healthy snacking choices that are available. We responded by developing a program called “Feed Your Curiosity: a Healthy Eating Initiative.” In the program, the young participants are asked to spin a wheel with several different new or unusual foods on it. They are asked to try the fruit or vegetable the spinner lands on and they can try any of the other offerings once they have tried the initial offering. We trialed our experiment on the after school program at Longfellow Elementary School in Clintonville, WI. We had approximately 65 participants ranging in grades kindergarten through fourth grade. The offerings we presented in the experiment were kiwi, mango, dragon fruit, kohlrabi, and jicama. At each station, the children tried the offering, were told fun facts about the item, got to see it in pictures, and there was whole piece of fruit or vegetable they could investigate. The results we obtained were rather abstract due to the chaos of having so many excited children running from station to station, but we compiled our individual observations and the observations of the teachers that helped out in the experiment. Our hopes are that the AmeriCorp group will take our experiment and implement it into their program for future use.
