"Fun in Seven"-Live, Learn, and Laugh!

Hello, Kids, Teachers, Parents, Pinay, Domestic Helpers, and anyone interested in health promotion and health education!

Welcome to the FUN-IN-SEVEN website!

Our health is a big part of our wealth, both for ourselves and also for the Hong Kong community. Good health also helps guarantee academic success! We hope that after you have visited and tried out some of the games and activities, you will have had a lot of fun and learned to eat and play healthily. Here's wishing you a healthy, fun, happy life and a healthy, active lifestyle!

WARNING! This is a large website, and spending too long a time sitting and exploring it may be hazardous to your health! So, after thirty minutes of sitting, turn off your computer, stand up and go do something active to burn more energy and build your fitness! Our bodies are made for action!

Hello, Teachers and Parents:

Welcome to FUN IN SEVEN !

This website is the result of an innovative school-based strategy to combat the most serious and wide spread health epidemic facing Hong Kong children: many of them are increasingly overweight, inactive, and unfit. But these problems are completely preventable through changes to a healthier lifestyle!

Children need to establish healthy lifestyles when young. As they grow and mature, the school health programs should give children not only knowledge and information, but more importantly, skills. Children and young people who learn how to apply the knowledge they gain starting in primary school days are more successful in developing healthy and physically active lifestyles and good health, and have academic success. Being able to identify and make healthy choices and respond appropriately to unhealthy situations applies knowledge in ways that promote health and prevent disease.

We hope this website will give you some of the information you can use to be good models of a healthy lifestyle and teach your students these important lifelong skills. These activities, divided into seven themes or content areas, can be used not just in health classes, but Hong Kong teachers have also successfully used them in mathematics, social studies, music, art, and other classes. Here's wishing you and your students good health and lots of fun laughing, learning, and living healthily together!

Background to FUN-IN-SEVEN

In late 1998, a group of multi-disciplinary health and education professionals with great concern for child and family health began to meet to combat childhood obesity and consider what we could do to contribute to education reform in Hong Kong. We decided that the first step was to develop a nutrition education and physical activity curriculum for primary and secondary students in Hong Kong, as we found these areas are given very little emphasis in the current primary and secondary curricula.

We wanted our Hong Kong children to have better diet, health, growth, and development from birth, so breastfeeding became our first theme as the first step to a healthier lifestyle. Integral to a healthy lifestyle is regular physical activity. To those two themes, we then added the Healthy Diet Pyramid, Healthy Breakfast, Healthy Lunch, Healthy Snacking, and Healthy Eating Out.

The result was 'FUN-IN-SEVEN', a seven-theme healthy lifestyle campaign for primary and secondary students. We designed the curriculum, and obtained funding from the Quality Education Fund to test it during the 2000-2001 academic year in 12 schools throughout Hong Kong. This website is the result of that year's efforts.

We hope that this website will stimulate awareness about healthy lifestyle behavior and spread our healthy lifestyle messages and skills further to more students, teachers, parents, domestic helpers and anyone else who visits, plays the games, sings the songs, and learns the material. We want the present generation of Hong Kong youth and their families to adopt healthy behavior and have a better chance to grow up healthily and enjoy reaching their full potential in life!

At the same time, we also hope you will join us and show your concern for the childhood obesity problem and its severe consequences, however you can in whatever your role in the Hong Kong community. Please support school and community initiatives that help to fight and stop this tragic problem. This is a huge challenge for us all, with action needed in all spheres.

Contact us any time with your feedback, questions, and other comments through our e-mail address: fun-in-seven@cuhk.edu.hk

Sincerely,

The Children's Healthy Eating and Physical Activity Promotion Committee:
May KM Au-Yeung, CUHK (nutritionist)
Yuet Oi Chee (nurse, midwife, lactation consultant and educator)
Ha Ying Chiu, CUHK (pediatrician)
Ka Yan Choi, CUHK (nutritionist)
Chun Bong Chow, Hospital Authority (pediatrician)
Kenneth KH Chui, CUHK (nutritionist)
Winnie SK Ho, Society for AIDS Care (public health specialist)
Patrick WC Lau, Baptist University (physical educator)
Georgia S Guldan, CUHK (nutritionist)
Maggie K Ma, United Christian Nethersole Community Health Service (registered dietitian)
Nancy SP Yiu (home economics consultant)
Renia CW Wan, CUHK (nutritionist)
Robert KN Yuen, Hospital Authority (pediatrician)