Kids Walk Across Arkansas
Education and Safety
Don't Hold Your Breath!
Goal: To prevent the use of tobacco by youth.
Objectives:
Participants will:
- Discuss the cost of using tobacco.
- Experience the lack of oxygen in the lungs.
- Determine the amount of tar the lungs accumulate in the lungs from tobacco use.
- See how the tissues of the lungs become hard.
Key Teaching Points:
- 410,000 secondary students in Arkansas
currently use tobacco.
- 17% or 50,000 Arkansas 7th graders use tobacco.
- Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.
- Poisons in tobacco are absorbed through the skin in the mouth and through
the lungs.
- Tar from tobacco use accumulates in the lungs creating emphysema, which
causes you to slowly suffocate.
- Second hand smoke causes the same problems as actually smoking the
cigarette.
Introduction:
The 1996 Arkansas School Survey completed by the Arkansas Commission on
Alcohol and Drug Abuse estimated 410,000 Arkansas secondary students were
currently using tobacco and nearly 50,000 of those were in 7th grade. In other
words, 17% of all 7th graders use tobacco (17 out of every 100). Let’s look at
the impact tobacco has on your money and on your health.
First let's look at the cost of using
tobacco. (Do Activity I)
Activity 1: Count Your Money
1. Ask participants to write down (may be done as a group or
individually) the things that they would do with $1,000 if it was given to them.
(Concert tickets, buy CD’s, pay for school tuition, take a trip, buy furniture,
etc.)
2. Ask participants to multiply 365 by $2.74 (about the cost
of a package of cigarettes/spit tobacco). Answer: Approximately $1,000
If you saved $2.74 a day for one year, you would save $1,000.
If you spent $2.74 a day for one year on tobacco, what would you have?
Now let's look at the impact tobacco has on your health.
Tobacco is the leading preventable cause of death in the United States.
According to the Center for Disease Control, tobacco kills more Texans than
alcohol, AIDS, heroin, auto accidents, suicides, handgun murders, and fires
combined. The poisons in tobacco are absorbed through the skin in the mouth and
through the lungs causing body functions to slow down or stop. One of the
poisons in tobacco is tar. Tar is the black, oily stuff used to pave streets. It
coats the air sacs in the lungs until you can no longer breath and you suffocate
to death (Suffocating to death in this way is called emphysema). Over the years
you are slowly suffocating, your body doesn’t get the amount of oxygen it needs
and the blood vessels get narrow, the kidney and bladder are washed with tobacco
poisons daily, and the heart is over worked. Soon a simple activity like walking
is hard to do.
Activity 2:Can You Breathe?:
(Caution: Be sure participants have no health
restrictions before they take part in the exercise.) The effort needed to
breathe through the straw resembles the characteristic shortness of breath
caused by emphysema.
Give each participant a 3-inch section of drinking straw. Explain the
experiment:
- Run in place for 1 minute
- Put the straw in your mouth and breathe only
through the straw (not through the nose).
- Bite gently on the straw as you try to
breathe to simulate an even more severe case of emphysema (slowly suffocating
to death).
- Resume normal breathing without the straw.
Discuss participant reactions. Did they gulp of
air? People with emphysema never get that gulp.
Activity 3: Tar Baby:
Show the amount of tar that a pack-a-day smoker
would inhale in a year (approximately 1 cupful, according to the American Cancer
Society). Pour 1 cup of thick, dark syrup or molasses slowly into a tall, thin,
clear container. Let participants guess when you will stop pouring.
Ask participants:
- Were you surprised at the amount of tar
inhaled by a pack-a-day smoker? Why or why not?
- What would happen if this were a
2-pack-a-day smoker?
Activity 4: Stay Soft
Allow participants to compare the feel of a damp, soft sponge and a dry, hard
sponge. The sponges demonstrate the difference between healthy lung tissue and
damaged tissue.
Ask participants: Why is hardened lung tissue a problem? (Answer: Once the
air sacs or Alveoli in the lungs are hardened, they can no longer squeeze out
air.)
As you can see, tobacco has an impact on our health as well as our money.
Also, breathing in second hand smoke, smoke from someone else’s cigarette, has
the same impact on your body as if you were the one smoking. Avoid all tobacco
and second hand smoke to increase your span and your money supply.
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