“Zipper” is what small children call their open-heart surgery scars. We honor all those little hearts during February’s Heart Month and are excited to share our client, Healthy NewsWorks’ Hearty Kids project which is promoting heart health awareness for students in kindergarten through second grade.

WHY HEART INFORMATION MATTERS TO KIDS?

The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia shares, congenital heart disease, those conditions you are born with, are 60 times more prevalent than childhood cancer.

25% of these kids will need heart surgery or an intervention to survive.

Healthy NewsWorks’ student journalists are 5- to 7-year-old reporters who are gathering facts about heart health and working with their classroom teachers and Healthy NewsWorks staff, to write and illustrate a section for each school’s newspaper. They promote the newspapers in their schools and share them with their families. Of parents surveyed, 70 percent said they discussed their elementary school’s Healthy NewsWorks newspaper with their kids.

Healthy NewsWorks mission is to empower student journalists to transform the health of their communities. Click to share child-appropriate heart videos: http://healthynewsworks.org/hearty-kids/

~Jeannette Fournier, Engagement Team Leader at Dunleavy & Associates

February 2018