Learning about the herbals from Justin was a wonderful activity to start off the rotation! He was so knowledgeable about the land and plants. He talked a lot about aloe and its uses. After mango season, many natives will have a 'cleanse' with aloe tea because mango is considered to heat up the body while the mango helps cool the body down.

The group was able to use this time as a team building activity as well because of the hike that we went on after Justin's talk. We all had two plants to look for so everyone was helping everyone. At one point three girls went to look for the casava plant that a person along the road had told them was 'over in that direction.'

Some lessons that we learned were how to help each other. Having more than one set of eyes is useful, but we need to slow down our lives and enjoy the scenery. We passed almost every plant that each of us was assigned to on our hike, but none of us have pictures of both of our plants.

From talking about aloe tea to pointing out the starfruit tree on the hike, I learned to appreciate the importance of sustainability and preservation of the land.

Ashley Gulvik

Why is it important to talk about medication safety?

It is important to discuss medication safety with children because many medications could easily be confused with candy. Today we had an activity with the children in the Delices elementary school where we showed them an item and they had to guess if it was a medicine or candy. It was amazing how many of them thought some of the medications were candy.  We had excellent participation and the kids were very enthusiastic. It is very important for them to understand that they need to check with adults before taking any medicines and that they need to be careful when taking anything that they think might be candy. Many medications now are flavored or have sweet coatings and unique dosage forms like gummi vitamins and it is really important that more care is taken when taking them. Because they are small, it doesn’t take much for a child to overdose. I feel that today’s exercise with the kids was well received and that they did learn some of the danger.

Why is it important to do a fun activity when teaching children?

            By making learning fun, children will remember it more easily and it makes them more relaxed and attentive. With a memorable activity the information can remain with the children longer and have more importance.

What can we do in the future to make these visits even better?

            It felt as if the visit went pretty well. The kids were able to remember the visit from the previous rotation and seemed to recognize that the candy/medicine game was coming along with a prize. The first activity was the game with the candy vs medicine and for correct answers the children received pencils. Then we had small group discussions and took the children outside to play games. Finally, we read to them before their day was over. I feel that the sequence of events would probably be better if the pencils had been given later in the day. Many of the children were running around with sharpened pencils during game play and several of them lost their pencils or they were broken. I am not going to go into the obvious dangers here.

           While I enjoyed spending more intimate time with the kids, some ideas for improving the activities may have been to provide more information to the rotation students about how the actual visit was going to proceed. I know I was surprised about the small group discussions and was really struggling with things to discuss with the children on such short notice. Perhaps a list of discussion possibilities would have been helpful. I feel that that may have been helpful with game play as well.

            I thought that it may have been fun to have a short song about pharmacy that they could learn and then repeat later. This would make it something that the kids would enjoy and remember. Overall, the visit went very well and I don’t think that the kids realized that we may have been struggling slightly. I really enjoyed the visit and the kids were wonderful and so enthusiastic.

Jill Zimmerman