Submitted by Ella Haase
On Friday, October 13th, I was given the opportunity to work with children at the Kingston 42 School District as an advocate for Generation RX – a nation-wide educational initiative to promote safe medication practices in an effort to prevent the misuse of prescription drugs. Generation Rx is offered through a partnership between the Cardinal Health Foundation and The Ohio State University College of Pharmacy. The Kingston 42 School District is a small rural district in Northwest Missouri. They serve students in preschool through 8th grade. Their mission statement is to Empower All. Below is a summary of each session that took place.
The 5th-8th grade group played the “Champions of RX” game, by dividing into two teams; team #1 self-named “Macaroni Savages” and team #2 self-named “Rebels”; the game helped initiate conversation among the teams as they answered the questions, and it also helped stress the critical issues of how to turn down the invitation to misuse and do their part to prevent misuse. Such important messages for these students at such an influential age. To help reinforce the message, we conducted the unknown reactions experiment and played roll the dice. We closed our conversation by reviewing the tips and advice handout, along with any additional questions they had, and discussing their opportunity to become Generation RX advocates in our community as well.
The 3rd-4th grade group earned their medication safety patrol badge, and wore it proudly while we had a question and answer activity to test their knowledge and encourage discussion, and we also learned how to identify the parts of a prescription medicine label and discuss the importance. We then jumped into a trivia game to reinforce our discussion, and closed with any additional questions the group had.
The pre-k-2nd grade was very energetic as we colored our medication safety patrol badges. Once all the needed crayon colors were retrieved for our coloring of badges, we moved onto learning the parts of a prescription medicine label and their importance. We then played two games “candy or medicine” and “good or bad choice”, helping the children to understand the need to leave medication in its original containers and helping to reinforce the good decisions in each scenario.
All the students went home with a treat bag, plus a letter for their parent or guardian to notify them of the medication safety principles we reviewed at school, and to also allow for extended learning at home.