Educational Activities in Leisure Time as an Opportunity to Promote a Healthy Lifestyle for Adults with Mental Disabilities

In my thesis I deal with educational leisure activities promoting a healthy lifestyle for people with mental disabilities. The aim of this work was to create an educational program for adults with mild and moderate mental disabilities to promote a healthy lifestyle, which will be implemented in their free time. This educational program was created on the basis of the analysis of expert sources, taking into account the specificities of the target group. Bachelor thesis consists of four chapters. To fulfill the aim it was primarily important to gather all the important information on the topic of the forthcoming educational program and to capture all the specifics of people with mental disabilities, which was necessary to know for working with the target group of the educational program. That's why in the first chapter I focused on a healthy lifestyle and its main components, especially on healthy eating and drinking habits, physical activity, mental hygiene and relaxation and the second chapter deals with adults with mental disabilities, their characteristics, and their access to education. Here I mention the classification of mental disability, the main determinants of people with mild and moderate mental disabilities and teaching principles and methods in the education of adults with mental disabilities. The third chapter is devoted to problems which an adult with mental disabilities deals with in terms of a healthy lifestyle. These three chapters show how it is appropriate to impart information about a healthy lifestyle for individuals with mental disabilities and what specifically they should learn in this sphere so that this information could be processed and subsequently internalize. In the fourth chapter, I proposed an educational program to promote a healthy lifestyle, described the progress of its implementation and subsequently underwent the evaluation. The appendix contains an application for the program, teaching aids for this program, a certificate for the participation in the program and a booklet with photographs from the implementation of the program, which participants received after its completion. The aim of the program is to familiarize participants with the principles of a healthy lifestyle, the support of the internalization of these principles and possible lifestyle changes. The program consists of 12 lessons, covering the main principles of a healthy lifestyle, and it emphasizes the practical aspect. 12 people signed up for its implementation, which lasted three weeks. The implementation showed that participants already had a basic understanding of the principles of a healthy lifestyle, but they cannot implement them into their daily life, which this program tried to help them with. For the overall evaluation of the program, I chose both objective and subjective techniques. I focused on analyzing the activities of participants as the objective techniques and I used the self-evaluation and the statement of the program´s participants as the subjective techniques. By the method of analysis of practical activities of participants, which included the last two sessions, I was convinced that the entire group of participants knows how they should eat and how their health can be strengthened because the correct method was invented by them and they tried it themselves. By the methods of my own observation, I realized that the program was not planned flawlessly. Time grants were particularly in the discrepancy with the preparation. When re-implementation of the program I would either adjust the time allocated for individual lessons, narrow the target group or limit the number of participants to 6-8 people