Empower

Media Smarty Youth is an interactive after-school education program for young people ages 11–13. It is designed to help teach children about the complex media world around them and how it can affect their health-especially in the areas of nutrition and physical activity.

Curriculum Implementation Guidelines

Curriculum offers structured lessons and a suggested time length, but can be flexible with time and audience. This program allows you to choose how often your group wants to meet to do the lessons.

***Note: Uses brand names, contractors are responsible for follow branding guidelines while using this curriculum.***

Health Through Literacy is a book set of five to six books, age-appropriate for each grade K–5. Each set includes books with nutrition or physical activity themes. Every book comes with a tip sheet to enhance the health messages in the book. The tip sheets help teachers discuss the books with their classes, incorporate physical activity into the reading of the book, provide ideas for a food tasting for students, and integrate health messages with other areas of the curriculum.

Growing Healthy Habits is a gardening and nutrition education curriculum for elementary aged kids. This resource focuses on integrating nutrition into the classroom through gardening and scripted lessons that meet science, language arts, social studies, health, and math objectives. Growing Healthy Habits uses gardening as a tool for encouraging students to consume more fruits and vegetables and whole grains, and increase physical activity.

Curriculum Implementation Guidelines

Units can be taught in any order and each lesson within each unit can be taught in any order, but all units of the curriculum must be taught.                                                                                 

This colorful handout developed by the Indian Health Service shows balanced meals with reasonable portion sizes. This tool shows three easy steps to knowing what and how much to eat. The front features a dinner plate. The back shows youth breakfast, lunch, and optional dinner plates. Based on the USDA MyPlate and designed for Native audiences.

Without leaving the classroom, students participate in a variety of purposeful movement designed to get the wiggles out and refocus the classroom — all in five minutes or less. GoNoodle involves movement activities that develop memory and fluency in math, spelling, and vocabulary.

This guide was developed to aid in designing and painting playgrounds with a goal of increasing opportunities for physical activity in preschools. The guide addresses: preschool physical activity recommendations; fundamental movement skills; suggested playground elements; and preparation and instructions for painting and tools to assist with playground designs.

Nemours Health and Prevention Services (NHPS) created these physical activity guidelines to help promote and support quality physical activity for children and youth. Those who work in child care centers, schools, community organizations or primary health care practices have powerful opportunities to ensure children have access to health-promoting physical activity on a daily basis. Equipped with information about best practices, parents, family members and neighbors can serve as important advocates to ensure that physical activity becomes a regular and enjoyable part of daily life for children.

This guide is intended to serve as a practical tool for implementing feeding best practices for optimal nutrition in early care and education settings. Those who work in child care centers, schools, community organizations or primary health care practices play an important part in supporting children’s development of healthy habits, both by providing nutritious food and by teaching children how to make healthy food choices. Children who learn these habits when they’re young are more likely to continue making healthy choices in adulthood. By sharing information with families and early care and education providers, you can work with them as partners to support healthy children.