Lockdown Week of 4-10 May, 2020
Dear Friends,
How is the ‘new normal’ for you? How are you easing out of lockdown? All fine here and both the children have commented to me this week how fast the time seems to be slipping by.
COVID!
It’s been great this week to add a little more to the growing list of COVID related resources for children. Some of these are in many languages. The first storybook on the list has been developed by our artist and author team, David and Liz Gifford. Please do share the list with home-schooling relatives and if you are at home with children aged 14 and under there should be something on this list for them.
We made our list available to the Health Information For All forum, and we have been very touched to get several ‘thank yous’. This one was a highlight…
“Just a little note to thank you for your generous gift of your collection of reading materials for children. I feel sure that many will benefit from them.”
Please let us know if you have been using any Children for Health materials and how they have been of help to you or the children you work with. We’d love to know, and it lifts our spirits!
ORAL HEALTH
At last! At last TODAY we have published our poster on ‘Oral Health’, and YOU are the first to be sent the link. I hope you like it. It has been developed over many months with oral health experts and health education practitioners from all over the world.
As with all our topics and posters, we identify 10 key messages for children to learn and share and then design activities around these messages. The Oral Health topic might be relevant more broadly than some of our other topics (like Malaria). Today I attended a webinar and one of the presentations included this shocking statistic, “Tooth decay remains the leading reason for hospitals admissions among 5- to 9-year olds, according to data published by NHS Digital.” (Royal College of Surgeons of England, Sept 2019)
SCHOOL HEALTH ONLINE COURSE
For those able and interested in taking a short online course on school health we like this one by Unite for Sight. Module 4 includes a nice piece on engaging children as health messengers. We published a post about on Friday 8th.
CHILDHOOD OBESITY
The webinar I was attending today was on Childhood Obesity and I was reminded of how useful our, ‘Rainbow Circle’ model might be in really looking at this problem – in the round. I would say that MOST of the presentations were looking at how environmental factors at various levels could impact the shocking increase in childhood obesity. For more, take a look at this post published last Tuesday…
We’d love to find a way to do some work on this issue and test our Rainbow Circle tool and other methods (in the UK) that have had such a great impact elsewhere.
MALARIA
Our beloved colleague in Mozambique has caught, and thankfully, almost recovered from a bout of malaria. There is no Covid-19 in the province where she lives so at least we didn’t have to worry about that. BUT it was a stark reminder of so many other serious health issues continuing to afflict so many throughout the world. Motivated by this, I published an article about our work linked to Malaria.
MEMORY PALACES
This week I finally managed to start building a Memory Palace using some online software and ONLY after trying alone for 22 hours. Then I had with my 17-year-old son join me and with all his gaming skills he was able to operate the software at blinding speed. So, he is now giving me lessons and I’m enjoying building a memory palace for our 100 messages. When its finished I’ll make a little video.
Keep, safe! Send us your stories!
Clare