On Thursday, January 26th my school district celebrated it's first Red Out event in support of the American Heart Association.  What a day it was!  My school district is comprised of 5 schools and every school participated in this event. If you are not aware of what a Red Out is it is an event in which students, parents, staff and community members purchase Red Out t-shirts and all of the money goes to the American Heart Association to support research and heart health!  So far my school district raised $9,300!! At my school we raised $3,440!!!

Another part of this event is raising awareness of heart health!  During my physical education and health education classes I lead discussions about heart health and leading a healthy lifestyle.  When we started this project we were asked to set a goal and I set a really high goal of selling 300 t-shirts.  We have 490 students at my school so I knew it was going to be a challenge.  As a teacher I always encourage my students to set high goals so I knew that I needed to follow my own advice.  

Two of the teachers at my school stepped up and volunteered to be part of an incentive to reach our goal.  The male physical education teacher that I teach with volunteered to wear a red dress the entire day on Jan. 26th and one of our 7th grade language arts teachers volunteered to wear a #4 Vikings Jersey (Now remember I teach in the heart of Green Bay Packers country and there is no team that is more unpopular than the Vikings!!!!).

I started selling the t-shirts and it was very slow at first.  Then one of the teachers came up with a great idea - Red Out Thursday's and a flash mob!  Every Thursday starting January 5th everyone who purchased a Red Out shirt wore it to school.  Every teacher on the faculty except a couple purchased a shirt and also promoted heart health to their students. 

After the first Thursday everything took off!!  Another teacher came to me and suggested we have a flash mob on the following Thursday during SMART Start (Every teacher in my school has ten students assigned to their SMART Start and the first 15 minutes of each day we start with SMART Start).  So on Jan. 12th we had our first flash mob in the gym.  The music started playing throughout the school and before I knew it we had hundreds of kids and teachers all dancing together!

On Thursday, Jan. 26th we had a Red Out Day, pep rally (which included a heart puzzle game and a heart beats basketball contest) we started the day with everyone coming to the gym to make a giant heart with everyone wearing their red out shirts (as you can see in the picture above) and it concluded with the Red Out at the high school basketball game.  What an experience!  I would love to hear from the readers of this blog about how you promote heart health at your school!