Making brain safety fun

The Boys and Girls Club of Whitecourt has been holding various themed activities throughout the summer weeks while school is out. Kyria Baranowski, Executive Director with the Boys and Girls Club, said, “We wanted this year’s summer programming to stay as local as possible. There are nine weeks that we offer, and everything we’re doing is around Whitecourt with some activities in Fox Creek and Mayerthorpe. We want our children to know what we have to offer within our community.” Last week’s activity “Bewildering Bodies” included learning about the five senses: sight, hearing, smell, touch, and taste, and how they all traced to the brain’s function. August 10, the children learned about the brain and how important it is to our bodies and survival.

Special guest Courtney Koopmans, Health Promotion Facilitator with Alberta Health Services, spent the afternoon discussing the Brain Waves Program which is part of the Injury Prevention Program. The program educates children about the brain, the importance of it, and why we should protect it, and part of that is learning about helmet safety.

Koopmans discussed the four different lobes within the brain being the occipital, frontal, parental, and temporal, and what each one does for the body and how important it is. “We have five senses controlled by our brain, so if we damage our brain and even though we may have good eyes, we can still lose our vision or possibly lose our sense of touch and taste. It’s important to discuss the safety as our brains don’t heal like a scratch on our leg does,” she said.

The focus was on kids wearing their helmets as too often they jump on their bicycles and don’t wear it, or they don’t fit properly. Koopmans recommends parents go online at the Alberta Health Services website (www.myhealth.alberta.ca) to learn proper techniques to fitting a helmet. The fitting procedure is called a Two-V-One which is two fingers above the eyebrows, ensuring the straps around the ears form a V-shape at the bottom of the ear, and only one finger should fit between your chin and the strap of the helmet.

Koopmans took each child aside to show how their helmet should fit and made the necessary adjustments, and then it was off to the skatepark for some fun on the ramps before closing out the day.