A Healthy Outlook

Photograph by Paul Ladd/Ladd Photography

No child likes being reminded to take a bath or told that dinner has to be more than french fries. And all parents grow weary of nagging their youngsters to keep clean and to eat right.

For families in the Houston area, help has arrived in the form of HealthAdventure, an educational program run by the Museum of Health & Medical Science. The program features trained museum volunteers and staff members who visit classrooms and use inventive methods to impart lessons about hygiene, physical fitness, nutrition, and safety. Since the program began in 1997, more than 50,000 children ages 3 through 7 have attended one or more of the 45-minute sessions, in which children learn why brushing their teeth and eating fruits and vegetables are important.

The Shell Oil Company Foundation gave $454,000 to cover the program’s first four years, and it will decide soon whether to extend the grant. The museum is also trying to raise money for a new school series on safety called Perry Medix and the Sirens, a rock-and-roll puppet show.

Of the program’s offerings, the Busy Body classes are by far the most popular. Students such as these pre-kindergarten youngsters at Gordon Elementary School, in Bellaire, Tex., learn to locate internal organs by detaching and reattaching the corresponding pictures on their aprons. The children also listen to their own heartbeat with a stethoscope, chart their pulse before and after physical activity, and engage in relay races where they blow a Ping-Pong ball through a straw to demonstrate lung capacity.