Students get physical
Brande Mergenthaler prepares sixth-grader Traygor Coor to lightly spare his opponent in the Polson Middle School gym on March 5 as part of the Healthy Choices Day. The students participated in various activites of their choice including watercolor painting, hiking, karaoke and boxing.
POLSON - While sixth-grader Traygor Coor was in the Polson Middle school gym getting a padded helmet strapped to his head for his first boxing experience, other Polson Middle School students were painting, singing karaoke, learning about scientific chemical reactions, skiing and snowshoeing.
Polson Middle School held its sixth annual Healthy Choices Day on March 5. The students took part in various activities at the Middle School, and at Blacktail Mountain and Glacier National Park.
Healthy Choices Day was started six years ago by Polson Middle School physical education teachers Cindy Templer and Dennis Johnson and counselors Kathy Fewlass and Rhonda Hinman.
"We were trying to come up with ideas to keep kids away from drugs and alcohol," Templer said about starting Healthy Choices Day. "We wanted to introduce kids to healthier choices by introducing them to activities that they have never done before."
The entire student body at Polson Middle School, 580 students, chose from a list of 20 activities to participate in. Every teacher chose an activity to teach.
"There is no way we could do it without everybody's help," Fewlass said.
Sixth, seventh and eighth graders participated in events together. Fewlass said this is done to bring the school together.
Activities included boxing, climbing, watercolor painting, ice skating, skiing and snowboarding, hiking, card games, gun safety classes, beading and scarf making. A new activity, called geocaching, involves using GPS coordinates to locate hidden objects.
Fewlass said that some of the more popular activities were the all-day field trips. One hundred students went to Blacktail Mountain to ski and snowboard. For about 70 percent of the students, it was their first time trying out the winter sports. A bus took about 40 students to Glacier National Park, where half of the students went snowshoeing and the other half cross-country skied. About half of the students had never visited the park before, Fewlass said.
"Lots of these kids don't get many opportunities to get out of Polson," Fewlass said.
Healthy Choices Day is an extension of Red Ribbon Week, a national week of activities held every October in the hopes of curbing drug and alcohol use among children.
"Hopefully they find something to do for the rest of their lives," Johnson said, explaining the event aims to extend drug and alcohol prevention beyond students' grade school years.