Warrior Wellness: An inside look at Willowbrook’s health education classes

Willowbrook students are working hard every day to become more educated with their health and wellness, and we are thrilled to showcase those accomplishments through this monthly column. In this month’s edition of Warrior Wellness, we are excited to highlight our health education classes.

Teens today are bombarded with difficult decisions. At times, those decisions can be life altering, habit forming and detrimental to one’s mental, emotional and physical health. Through our health education classes, our focus is to better students' health literacy and knowledge to help them make informed decisions and become advocates for themselves and others.

Here is a look at what we have accomplished so far this semester:

Health and Wellness

• Students have reflected on their total health and wellness and have begun to analyze different influences on their health.

Body Systems (pictured above, top right)

• Students have enhanced their knowledge about their assigned body systems by creating informative posters. Those posters not only educated their classmates, but also helped make the connections of interactions among the body systems.

Communicable Disease

• From the common cold to Ebola and Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs), students have gained knowledge on how to prevent infectious diseases.
  
  
• Students also created informative emergency audio alerts to warn the public about a possible epidemic, the symptoms and how to protect themselves from disease transmission.

Noncommunicable Disease

• Students have gained knowledge about the prevention, signs/symptoms, treatments and risk factors associated with noncommunicable diseases (such as cancers, heart disease and diabetes).
  
  
• Students also created informational brochures to educate their classmates about noncommunicable diseases.

CPR/First Aid (pictured above, left)

• Students have learned how to help others in various first aid scenarios, including broken bones, severe bleeding, seizures, insulin shock, poisoning, administering an EpiPen and adult/child/infant CPR.

On the health horizon
Future health education topics will include:

• Fitness and Nutrition
• Mental Health
• National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) presentation on Nov. 7
• Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs
• Human Sexuality and Relationships
• Family Shelter Service presentation on dating violence

• The Warrior Wellness column provides an inside look into the physical education, health and driver education classes at Willowbrook. This feature will highlight what students are working on in the classroom, as well as student successes in those departments. The column will run in the District 88 Newsletter on the first Friday of each month during the school year.