I recently received the coolest gift – thank you Gaby from Westwood Unidos! It’s a water bottle with a fruit dispenser built into it. I’ve already used it (added some mandarin oranges to it) and I will admit, it did encourage me to drink more water.
Teachers and school staff are always searching for creative ways to encourage students to drink more water. One school I visited had beautifully designed water dispensers; one with fresh cantaloupe, another with fresh strawberries and still another with fresh lemons in it. All looked very inviting!
And some of you, like me, may remember the old gray metal drinking fountains in schools that dispensed what tasted like rusted water. It certainly wasn’t designed to encourage water consumption. Well, New York City public schools have a solution to these old machines. They have installed “water jet” machines (even the name sounds cool!) in their schools to encourage water consumption.
These modern-looking machines dispense fresh tap water that has been oxygenated. The oxygen really doesn’t provide any nutritional value, but they say does make the water taste better.
Some interesting research on water-jet machines:
- They have been linked to a small reduction in obesity rates in NY city schools. http://www.livescience.com/53414-water-jets-fight-student-obesity.html
- One study found that there was a 3-fold increase in water intake over the course of three months in schools with these types of machines. http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2014.302221.
I do have to mention that what I found to be the most successful way of encouraging students to drink water is teacher and staff modeling. One school that I worked with decided that school staff and teachers would only drink water on school premises in front of students. And guess what? Students started to do the same.
How do you encourage your students to drink more water?