How to be healthy
- Split into small groups.
- Discuss ways that people can live healthily. The person leading the activity should go between the groups and offer clues. Examples include exercising, eating healthy food and getting enough sleep.
- Each group should pick an important healthy lifestyle choice from the ones they talked about. Groups are allowed to pick the same lifestyle choice as other groups, if they wish.
- Each group should take some time to plan out a scenario that they will act out together. The scenario should last no more than two minutes and each member of each group should have a role in the performance. Each scenario should be about the important healthy lifestyle choice that the group has chosen and how it helps somebody.
- Give each group another five or ten minutes to rehearse their scenarios amongst themselves and make any changes they’d like to make.
- Invite each group to act out their scenario to the rest of the group.
- While a group is acting, the rest of the young people should try to guess which healthy lifestyle choice is being acted out.
What makes up a healthy lifestyle?
Learn about living healthily by heading over to our healthy lifestyles page.
Healthy top tipsReflection
The group have acted out some healthy lifestyle behaviours in small teams. Who do you think gave the most realistic performance? Which healthy lifestyle choices were the easiest to demonstrate? Were you and your small group able to work together well to show how important your lifestyle choice was, or would it have been easier to do it alone?
Everyone in the group should have seen some healthy lifestyle behaviours that can help people live better. Did anyone learn something new about healthy living? Does anyone already try to eat healthily, sleep ten hours and exercise daily? What kind of benefits could these behaviours have?
Safety
All activities must be safely managed. You must complete a thorough risk assessment and take appropriate steps to reduce risk. Use the safety checklist to help you plan and risk assess your activity. Always get approval for the activity, and have suitable supervision and an InTouch process.
- Active games
The game area should be free of hazards. Explain the rules of the game clearly and have a clear way to communicate that the game must stop when needed. Take a look at our guidance on running active games safely.
While circling the room, the person leading the activity could help any groups that are struggling by suggesting ways that they can structure their performance (e.g. by showing the effect of lots of sleep against the effect of not enough sleep).
Expert actors could take on several different lifestyle behaviours in the two minutes, while the rest of the group tries to guess as many as they can from the performances.
Help come up with acting roles that those with mobility issues, learning difficulties or sensory impairments are comfortable doing.
If people are too shy, you could get the group to make sock puppets to perform the sketch
All Scout activities should be inclusive and accessible.
Plan an ‘improv’ evening, where the group can demonstrate their healthy lifestyle acting skills. A group member could read out scenarios for the actors to perform and they should do as many of them as they can within two or three minutes. Award bonus points to performances that make the audience laugh!
Allow young people to decide which healthy behaviours to act out, even if they are the same as those chosen by other groups. It is important for everyone to share what they know already about healthy lifestyles.