Anti Smoking Activities
- One activity you can organize for your community is "Kick Butts Day." Kick Butts Day occurs every year -- in 2011 it is on March 23rd -- empowering youth to speak up and take action against "Big Tobacco" at more than 1,000 events across the United States. Schools, churches and other organizations can register with Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids to join in on the Kick Butts Day festivities. Your organization can hold a health fair, make videos and songs or create a mural or memorial wall to provide important information about smoking dangers and how it impacts lives.
- When you talk about smoking statistics, children may have a difficult time understanding how the numbers pertain to "real life." Developing activities that can more adequately demonstrate these statistics is an excellent way to promote anti-smoking. Have a certain amount of people in your group wear a specific color t-shirt indicating that they will be impacted negatively by cigarette smoking. You can also give kids a make-believe bank account of $700, and ask what they would spend with it. This amount of money is the average, per person, spent per year on cigarettes. Making numbers and statistics more realistic can have a greater impact on youth.
- Advertising companies use a variety of tactics to promote products to different age groups. If you are working with young people, an excellent anti-smoking activity is to address cigarette companies' ad campaigns. Find cigarette ads in magazines, newspapers and in stores and place them on pieces of posterboard. Have kids or other participants look at the advertisements and then write underneath each ad how it is attempting to make cigarette smoking appealing. By bringing attention to advertisement tactics, you can help increase anti-smoking awareness.
- Cigarettes are composed of thousands of chemicals, some of which leave visible traces, both in the air and on surfaces, like your lungs. Highlight a few of the compounds found in cigarettes -- toluene and acetone are examples of toxic household chemicals found in paint thinners and removers as well as cigarettes. You can also show the tar build-up that occurs in your lungs with a juice bottle, a cotton ball and some modeling clay. Place a cotton ball in a juice bottle, and place a cigarette with its filter end into the neck of the bottle. Seal the juice bottle by placing modeling clay around the cigarette. Light the cigarette and squeeze the juice bottle to simulate someone smoking. Once the cigarette is burned down, put it out and remove the cotton ball from inside the bottle to show the participants the tar build-up.
