CATCH

Walsh Middle School is a CATCH middle school! CATCH stands for Coordinated Approach to Child Health. It is a resource or tool for bringing schools, families and communities together to work toward creating a healthy learning environment.

More children in this country are overweight than ever before, more than triple the number who were overweight  in the late 1970's. Children who are overweight are more likely to develop diabetes and other chronic disease risk factors like high blood pressure or high cholesterol.

There are 4 components to CATCH. There is a PE component, Eat Smart component, Classroom component and the Family component. CATCH PE is designed to promote student's enjoyment and participation in moderate to vigorous physical activity during PE classes, extra-curricular activities and recreation time with family and friends. The Eat Smart Program is the child nutrition services component of CATCH. Eat Smart involves not only improving the nutritional quality of school meals, but also includes promotion and coordination ideas for linking good food to good health. The Classroom component of CATCH will help students to identify and understand health science concepts, practice healthy eating and physical activity behaviors and adopt healthy lifestyle behaviors. Finally the CATCH Family component is designed to get students, parents and extended family members involved in practicing and adopting healthy eating and physical activity when at home.

Does CATCH Middle School work? Yes! CATCH Middle School components demonstrated an increase in vigorous physical activity levels and activity time after school and on the weekends, have shown a decrease in TV watching and sedentary activities, have shown improvements in standardized test scores and demonstrated effects in increasing bone density.

Check out all the upcoming CATCH news at www.catch.org