From the first week of NYSP

              After the first week of camp, the National Youth Sports Program at CWRU, I am already able to see how a program like this could forever change the lives and life choices of the children involved. If you are like me, you probably have not heard about NYSP and all of the work that is put into it, only in hopes to greatly and positively influence the children from the greater Cleveland area. I personally had no idea about NYSP until I was told about it as an opportunity for capstone completion.  However, after learning about the program, I found myself feeling as though this would be a great experience to not only expand my cultural knowledge but give back to an area and community that I am currently a part of.

 As I said before, after I have now completed the first week, I am continuously seeing more and more of the positive influence this program could have on the local population of children. With much work going into this program, each of us play our own part in pulling the whole camp together. My specific job in the camp for the first half is to educate some of the groups of children on health maintaining topics and for the second half, participate in the sports activities with the children and help out where ever assistance is needed. With the first week of classes down, myself and the group of student nurses I am working, have decided to change up our methods of teaching. As each group comes from a number of sports activities into our classroom, we find them to be often restless. Upon learning this, we changed our teaching methods to three 15 minute activities to educate the campers on various health topics. With three 15 minute activities, we are able to keep the children’s attention for the most part and keep them engaged in what we are trying to teach them. For example, we discussed basic first aid with them this week. We had students engage in learning and then performing the Heimlich Maneuver and actually had a positive response from some of the kids saying, “I wish I would have known how to do this before”. Even something as basic as the Heimlich Maneuver can be so beneficial for these children to know. It’s lack of knowledge about basic beneficial health information such as this that makes me excited to teach them for the next few weeks. We have the opportunity to educate them about health maintaining behaviors that could greatly affect the way they live on a daily basis. We can only hope to educate this population on health maintaining choices greatly enough to have them adopt what we teach them into their daily lives.

                In the next few weeks, I hope to teach these students health maintaining concepts that will change their life forever. We were told in a group meeting today that we are affecting these children’s lives more than we can even imagine, and I am beginning to realize the effect this camp does have on each and every camper involved. I am excited to not only teach this group of children, but also learn from them and apply it to how I practice as a nurse. After only the first week, I am already learning so much from them and am excited to see what the next few weeks has in store for me.