Welcome to this week’s edition of Beyond Watching the Show, where I give some ideas of activities for kids that enjoy a particular show that go beyond just watching the show. If you have more ideas of activities for this show please comment and share your ideas. Also, please comment here if you have a request of a show to feature in an upcoming edition of Beyond Watching the Show.
This week’s edition is a special one that does not focus on a particular show. Instead it is about Disney’s Healthy Kids website, which features characters related to the Disney shows of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Kim Possible, and Lilo & Stitch. I first discovered this website earlier this week and found it to be a great one that I think all kids should be encouraged to check out and learn from. The main thing that makes me recommend this is that it was an 8-year-old that showed this site to me and together we played on the site and had fun with it. The most amazing thing to me is this is a kid that mostly plays action games and this site is mostly trivia, but yet even he liked it.
The Disney Healthy Kids site is set up to resemble a camp competition between Disney’s Champ Camp (you help this team) and Lazy Acres. As you navigate the different areas of the camp competition the site teaches about the new food pyramid and eating a balanced diet. The site says the dialogue aloud, so turn the computer sound on, especially for kids who are not great readers, yet.
You start in the Mickey’s Mess Hall area, where you learn the basics of the food pyramid such as what the different color bars on it stand for. After you have learned about all the basics you take the trivia challenge about the information you learned in this area. You can pick to be Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Donald, or Daisy and you compete against Pete as the Lazy Acres representative. If you get more point than the opponent, then you get a token for the area, which shows up in the bottom right corner of the window.
The second area is Kim Possible’s Science Cave. This area teaches about moderation and how it relates to the food pyramid. The trivia part after you learn about this topic works the, but you get to be Kim Possible characters (Kim or Ron) and play against the Kim Possible villain, Drakken.
The third are is Lilo’s Luau. In this area teaches about proportions and how much of each color bar you should eat compared to other bars. In the trivia part you can choose to be Lilo or Stitch and you are against Gantu.
The final area is Incredible Island. Here the you learn about how exercise is the stair part of the new food pyramid and how much it takes to burn off different food items. In the trivia part you can choose to be Violet or Dash and you are against Syndrome.
After you have token from each area you can take on the Champ Camp Relay. Now this is an action game making the other parts something you want to play through, in order to play this fun game. In level 1 you are Mickey and you just use the up arrow key to jump over obstacles and jump to eat food to keep his energy up. It gets faster as you go and you just try to go as far as you can before you run out of energy. You then get to shoot soccer goals based on how long you lasted before you move onto level 2 featuring you as Kim Possible. In this one you jump using up and duck using the down arrow. There is another soccer shooting bonus game before you proceed to the third level in which you also play as Stitch duck and jump to avoid obstacles as well as collecting the green food and avoiding the red food. After another soccer bonus level you proceed to level 4 in which you us up an down as before and also use the space bar for a force field. One more soccer bonus round after this and you get your final camp score.
To play entirely through it takes at least an hour, but can be longer. It certainly is kind of long to be recommended as something to let kids play through everyday, but letting them do it at least a few times within a span of a few weeks or a month until they have learned all the info well is a good way for them to learn about eating and living a healthy lifestyle. It sure is a fun way to learn about the new food pyramid and even parents may find it fun to play through themselves because the food pyramid sure has changed from its old form.
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and 
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for the Nintendo DS, and 
for Nintendo Wii (PS2 version expected to be released in August 2008). There is also a Hannah Montana 3 for Nintendo DS expected to be released in August 2008.
