By Mikayla van Loon
An Inspiro led and designed program aiming to get primary school children to change the way they think about physical activity has been nominated for a statewide award.
The Morning Move For Mind (MM4M) program is listed as a finalist in the Victorian Health Promotion Awards for 2022 for Outstanding Health Promotion.
“It’s a real honour. An absolute honour to be nominated. It’s a very highly sought after acknowledgement of any kind of health promotion project to be announced as a finalist,” Inspiro health promotion officer Megan McInerney said.
“So it’s a really, really big deal for us to be nominated and we’re really proud of the program.”
VicHealth CEO Dr Sandro Demaio said the awards celebrate the amazing work of groups and individuals making a difference through health promotion initiatives across the state.
“The 36 finalists unveiled today (6 Dec) have shown incredible commitment to the health and wellbeing of communities across Victoria in the past year,” Dr Demaio said.
“The 2022 Victorian Health Promotion Awards are the perfect platform to showcase the great work happening in health promotion, and to inspire others to do the same.”
Having encouraged 150 students across three different schools in the Dandenong Ranges to combine movement with mental health and wellbeing awareness, health promotion officer Tom McKinnon said it has been well received by the students.
“The program is a well being lesson done in an active way. So we’re trying to increase the physical activity of kids, but also educate them around emotional well being,” he said.
“It’s been well received and it’s not some of the information is new to them, like the positive coping strategies, some of them might already do exercise if they’re feeling angry or something, but might not have made that connection before that is a coping strategy.”
The program goes through various emotions the children might feel, as well as what may trigger that feeling and how getting active can be a positive coping strategy.
“It’s also about having that confidence and that space to be able to have those conversations in a safe environment as well, where they’re not feeling embarrassed to talk about [their emotions],” Megan said.
Inspiro set up the MM4M program initially prior to Covid but this year Megan and Tom have streamlined it to run an eight week program, twice a week for 30 minutes for two different age groups.
“We come and train the teachers first and we run one or two sessions the first week and then the teachers will take over after that,” Megan said.
“So hopefully having the teachers do the teacher training first helps them have that confidence to be able to run the program themselves…it means it’s more sustainable for the program and it can be continued to be rolled out each year by the teachers.”
Kallista Primary School Grade 2 and 3 teacher Grace said she has definitely seen the value in the MM4M program and has inspired her to take more lessons outside.
“I learned a lot, the kids learned a lot about wellbeing strategies. The one they really enjoyed, which they didn’t know much about was happy triggers,” she said.
“It was good that they learned triggers aren’t always about the negative side, there’s positive ones. It was great to get them outside moving around. They were more settled in class because they got to have a run around and burn the energy.”
Tayla, a student at Kallista Primary, said she loved learning about mindfulness strategies, particularly reading and meditation.
Jeff on the other hand couldn’t decide which part was his favourite because he enjoyed it all.
Megan said Inspiro has been able to conclude that with children taking part in MM4M, they complete an extra 400 minutes of exercise.
“We know that young kids spend so much time on their screens, so to be able to get them out and do more exercise, even if it’s at school or thinking about how they can increase their activity outside of school hours, that’s a really big part of the project to just get them moving more,” Megan said.
“It’s also knowing the difference between exercise and physical activity. We don’t want them to just think of physical activity as doing sport. We’re also encouraging the idea of playing with your pet as physical activity or jumping on the trampoline in the backyard is a physical activity,” Tom said.
Inspiro will find out whether it has been the lucky recipient of the award in February.
