News
6th June 2013
We have now finished our lessons at little leaders pre-school. The children were engaged and lively throughout the lessons and greatly enjoyed themselves. The volunteers also had fun teaching the children about healthy eating and exercise. The parent and child lessons, which we gave for the first time were successful and allowed us to aid parents in keeping not just their children healthy, but, also themselves. Hopefully, both the parents and children will use the knowledge we have given them in these sessions, to lead a happy and healthy life.
28th April 2013
Check out our new Testimonials page!
27th March 2013
We have just received some feedback from Church Road Primary School. The childrens favourite lesson was exercise because they were able to run around and do an obstacle course. They enjoyed the sessions so much that they think we should have longer lessons, more lessons and include more activities! Also, a big thank you to all the volunteers that took part!
27th February 2013
Our first nursery session was great! We taught the children about the effects of being overweight and some of the children dressed up in a sumo suit to find out what it would be like, which they thoroughly enjoyed. One of our volunteers even had a go! The children were all very enthusiastic and it was a pleasure for the volunteers to teach them. We look forward to teaching them again and hope they enjoy the rest of our lessons just as much.
20th December 2012
We have wrapped up our lessons for the year, finishing our last lesson at Church Road Primary School last week. We’ve received excellent feedback from the school and would like to thank our volunteers and the school for making this possible. The children had a blast and enjoyed our activities every session where they ended up learning without even realising it. In our concluding session, we went over all the lessons we had taught over the last month and it was really encouraging to see that the children remembered so much.
Here’s the feedback we received from Mrs. Rebecca Parker, a teacher at Church Road Primary School.
“Both the children and myself have thoroughly enjoyed the H.A.P.P.Y scheme- the lessons were delivered extremely well by Emily, they were pitched at exactly the right level for the children and made fun and interesting so that the children were learning without realising it! It was amazing to see how much the children had actually learned by the last session. The sessions were relevant to the children and all children were extremely engaged from start to finish. In particular, the fruit tasting lesson and the tooth experiment were a huge hit!”
We are looking forward to more successful school visits next year and are working hard over the Christmas holidays on developing lessons and fun activities for nursery children.
Merry Christmas and look out for more activity from H.A.P.P.Y. in the new year!
4th December 2012
Thanks to the success of H.A.P.P.Y. Scheme in primary schools so far, we are about to expand and go into nurseries from Feb 2013. Don’t miss out on this unique volunteering opportunity and get in touch to be involved! More details about our nursery scheme to follow soon.
3rd December 2012
Church Road Primary School
H.A.P.P.Y. Scheme has just completed our 3rd lesson at Church Road Primary School in Bolton. So far, we’ve conducted lessons on eating a balanced diet, 5 a day and exercise. It’s been a joy to teach the children at Church Road and we’ve been pleased with the enthusiastic response that we’ve had during all our sessions. Each session’s message has been reinforced with a fun activity, which the children thoroughly enjoy, such as fruit tasting and using pedometers. It has also been great to see that the children remember our lessons from previous sessions and can relate what they’ve learnt back to us. We’re looking forward to the last 2 sessions we have at Church Road, and hope to be able to get the message of leading a healthy lifestyle across and to leave a lasting impact on all the children that we’ve taught.
1st November 2012
Training Session
Last week, we held a training session for interested volunteers who are STEMNET registered. We went over what the H.A.P.P.Y Scheme is about, where we’re up to so far and where we’re headed in the future. The volunteers were given an overview of what each of our lessons cover and tips for teaching children. With our volunteers all set for carrying out the lessons, the H.A.P.P.Y Scheme is raring to go into schools and enrich young minds! We’re currently in the midst of making arrangements to go into a school before they break up for Christmas.
For those of you who could not make the training session, we’ll be holding another one within a couple of weeks, so you’ll still be able to teach at the next school we go to.
30th September 2012
Welcome Fair
H.A.P.P.Y has had a great start to the new academic year with our recent success at the Medical Welcome Fair on 17/9 at the Stopford Building. As our very first appearance at the fair, we’ve managed to spread awareness about the scheme and garner interest among students and staff members. Our stall became a quick favourite for offering bags of free fresh fruit! We’d like to thank everyone who visited for making our stall a success.
We’re happy to announce that we’ve recruited 57 medical students as volunteers for our ventures into schools this year. If you missed the fair but would still like to get involved, drop us an e-mail at happyscheme@gmail.com.
We’re currently getting ready for our upcoming training sessions for new volunteers and lining up more schools to visit this year.
21st June 2012
Our new committee have been working together to prepare for our upcoming events including starting at our next school, Cheetwood Primary, this week and the Manchester Public Health Festival on the 2nd of July.
http://www.gmpublichealthpracticeunit.nhs.uk/2012/03/festival-of-public-health-uk-manchester-2-july/
Below we introduce our committee, starting from bottom left and continuing clockwise:
Naz – Communications officer
Emily – Volunteers co-ordinator
Rachael – Schools co-ordinator
Simran – Treasurer
Amy – Vice Chair
Reshmee - Chair
We were excited to meet the Year 5 class at Cheetwood Primary School this week, and look forward to working with them over the coming month!
23rd May 2012
This month we launched our Facebook group, in order to recruit volunteers and help promote the scheme to medical students at Manchester. We were delighted to have an influx of interest to our Facebook group, with 62 members recruited in just over a week! We also created our Facebook page and Twitter account, to help promote the scheme to a wider audience. These are continuing to grow and we hope to be able to increase the numbers further. If you are interested in the scheme then find out more by liking our Facebook page ‘H.A.P.P.Y. Scheme’ and following us on Twitter @H.A.P.P.Y.Scheme.
11th May 2012
H.A.P.P.Y. - The story so far
The H.A.P.P.Y. scheme are excited this month to be launching officially our Facebook, Twitter and blog page! Our new 2012/2013 committee have been hard at work planning how we can progress and preparing for our next school and student recruitment drive in September.
As this is our first blog post we thought it would be nice to include our story so far…
H.A.P.P.Y. was created in May 2011, by a group of medical students at the University of Manchester, who all share the view that childhood obesity is a preventable, unnecessary condition. We all want to be involved in tackling this issue hands on, and ultimately begin to change the trend of rising childhood obesity levels.
Led by the founder, we began by planning a pilot run in a year 3 class at a local school. To get to the point of being able to do this, many months of preparation and planning were required before hand to gain funding, plan lessons, set-up resources and ensure appropriate CRB and other logistics were set-up. In February 2012 five of us piloted the first scheme at St. Philips school in Hulme. Despite not running smoothly the whole way, our pilot was overall a success! We learnt which parts of our lessons worked well (and which didn’t!), the best activities to engage the children and improved our classroom teaching style. Even though it was hard work we all had a lot of fun taking part and all left with new-found deeper respect for primary school teachers!
The success of the pilot gave us the confidence and motivation we needed to make the scheme bigger and better. So, for the last few months we have been planning how to do that.
Other highlights from the last few months include winning the Social Enterprise prize at the University of Manchester Venture Out competition, which gave us further inspiration to take our idea forward.
We have a lot planned for the next few months, including our next school visit and taking part in the Greater Manchester Festival of Public Health, so watch this space!
If you are medical student interested in volunteering, a school interested in taking part or are just interested in finding out more, we would be happy to provide more information.
Written by Lucia Magee
H.A.P.P.Y. Founder
