I attended the IMIL 2 day training in Worcester MA and enjoyed it very much. I have since brought back what I have learned to my Headstart classroom and my children love it. We have Choosy Time for 20 minutes during morning activity time, then 25 minutes of Choosy Time with the cd player in our gross motor room at 10am and another 25 minutes of Choosy Time in the afternoon after rest/snack. If my children could, they would do "Choosy" all day long. They are also more aware of how to eat healthier and because I remind them how Choosy eats healthy and makes healthy choices about food they ask me "is this healthy, does Choosy eat this...?" I am so thankful that I was able to attend the conference!!!

I am in Region 10 and attended IMIL in December. Yesterday I was the workshop presenter at our state association meeting, for about 40 parents. I spent 2 hours with this wonderful group giving them an overview of the information we received at the conference.

First of all I am so grateful for having access to the power point slides. This made my job so much easier. I wanted to share everything with them but it was going to be impossible to cram 3 days of information into 2 hours. I was able to pick and choose which slides I wanted to use and these then acted as conversation starters for us.

This group of parents had a great foundation of information on this topic, which allowed us to have an insightful conversation around obesity, the causes, what we can do differently, etc.

My goal was to get us up and moving every 30 minutes. Well when I went to do the first song I realized I had left my Choosy CD's at the office, an hour away. So what to do? I really don't sing that well but with the support of the audience I sang, "This is Body..." and actually managed the correct tune. Thank goodness we sang that song repeatedly at the conference or I would have never been able to carry it off.

I also did "Shake, stir, pound & roll" which was a little easier. I had brought other music to play such as "Freeze Dance, Gloria Estefan's "Conga" (great to do Joe's marching) to do some other movement things with. Over all it was a great success. Thank you for the information and the opportunity to practice it enough so that we can confidently get up in front of our peers and parents to share this valuable message. You guys are great!

Does anyone have ideas of how to use the Choosy vegetable and fruit bean bags with kids? I need ideas for a teacher training in Sonoma County, California.
thanks!!

The vegetable and fruit bean bags can be purchased at the Produce for Health web site. http://www.fruitsandveggiesmorematters.org. A great game and activity can include a parachute or sheet activity where the children hold the edges of the parachute and simulate "stirring and mixing" of the fruits and vegetables as they are tossed into the center of the parachute. As in the IMIL training, a song like "Sir the Soup" can be played to initiate the movements and colors revolving around the parachute. If a parachute is not available, many programs use a sheet.

We have waited a long time for something like this to come along. Thank you Linda Carson for an excellent healthy, physical and nutrional activity program. Our team is very excited to go around to our tribal sites and share what we learned from the training conference IMIL. Thank you once again.

Thanks for good post

Thanks for good post