Healthy Living Resources

As you plan for this month's lesson, the following resources and ideas might be helpful.

Slides in Powerpoint and in PDF formats.

Click here for this month's family newsletter in English and here for the newsletter in Spanish.

Click here for the link to the 2016-17 Classroom Champions Planning Manual to find even more resources on Healthy Living from pages 21-24!

This month's video lesson may contain several big points:

1. What Healthy Living  embodies:
1. Nutrition and hydration
2. Sleep
3. Exercise
4. Saying no to underage drinking
5. For olders: Body image

2. Exploring Healthy Living:
1. Vocabulary
2. How to engage
3. Healthy Living in Action
4. Healthy Living on the Page
5. For your own learning

3. A challenge to the students that may include:
1. Set a short term goal regarding a healthy choice with nutrition, sleep, or activity level.
2. Involve their families in making a healthy choice with them -- trying a new physical activity together, trying a new fruit or vegetable, getting to bed a little earlier, or talking about underage drinking. Each student might be asked to report back to the class about how it went.

You may want to prepare for watching the video lesson by:

1. Planning for vocabulary development as needed
2. Preparing a Frayer model to make Fair Play more concrete by creating examples and non-examples of Perseverance. Click here to view an example of a Frayer Model.

There will be lots of information that will be helpful in planning this topic below. Please pick and choose what works best for you and your students. Texts will be at the bottom of this blog entry.

Vocabulary Development

Healthy Living is a big contributing factor in how well your brain learns. This vocabulary may not be new for your students but this can be an opportunity to help them find ways to make it relevant in their lives and to include their family and friends as they explore ways to engage with healthy living in their daily lives.

Quotes about health from Brainy Quotes. Be careful with quote collections around health! Many meme collections are more along the line of promoting unhealthy habits, like exercising so a person deserves to eat. Scary stuff.

How to Engage in Healthy Living:

Healthy Living is a choice that is made multiple times everyday, be mindful of the resources students in your community have access to when exploring viable options for a healthier lifestyle. As noted above, despite access to certain resources, once of the basics of Healthy Living is the ability to make good decisions.

It is very helpful to learn how to read labels and have awareness about the ingredients in your food. This can be highlights in core subjects such as Math for calorie counting, English for defining what some of the lengthy terms mean, Science to learn more about what makes up certain ingredients, and Social Studies to learn where some ingredients originate.

• Choose My Plate – US gov resource
• Daily Mail Article: What school lunches look like around the world (scroll past big zombie banner ad at the top prior to making screen live for kids) Here's another link to an article about this via BuzzFeed (no zombies, but less explanation).
• Seedmap.org See where foods come from.
• Hungry Planet A photo book about who eats what and where. Food as cultural exchange might be a nice way to integrate nutrition and social studies.
• The Sandwich Swap was recommended during our planning meeting.
• Several extension services or farmers markets that offer monthly tastings in the schools. Please do a search for this in your geographic area. The Food Trust in the Camden, NJ area is an example of one such program.

Hydrate

Up to 60% of the human adult body is water! According to H.H. Mitchell, Journal of Biological Chemistry 158, the brain and heart are composed of 73% water, and the lungs are about 83% water. The skin contains 64% water, muscles and kidneys are 79%, and even the bones are watery: 31%.

• The Hydration Calculator will help you determine your ideal level of hydration: http://www.camelbak.com/HydrationCalculator
• Facts about clean water, from the nonprofit water.org
• Climate Impacts in Water Resources: https://www.epa.gov/climate-impacts/climate-impacts-water-resources

Sleep

School aged children need 10 hours of sleep per night. Only 59% of kids grades 6-8 are getting that. –American Academy of Pediatrics survey.

• Article for parents about sleep: Zombie Prevention: You Child’s Sleep (New York Times)
• How sleep is connected to emotional regulation and mental health: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mIhKvjpnPg

Exercise

It’s important to incorporate fun and play into exercise! It can help take the mind off the sore muscles :)

• Stretching together as a class can help students get motivated. The Colorado Education Initiative has put together a Teacher Toolbox for Physical Activity Breaks in the Secondary Classroom. http://www.coloradoedinitiative.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/CEI-Take-a-Break-Teacher-Toolbox.pdf
• Recommended by Mentor Coordinator Andy: Exercise changed a neuroscientist’s life and now she wants to change yours (Huffington Post).  
• Indoor recess Pinterest Board
• Christian Science Monitor summarizes the American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement on the importance of recess and free play.
• Playworks.org – a free, searchable library of indoor and outdoor recess games. You can filter by age, time limit, location, and equipment.
• GoNoodle.com is an awesome brain break.
• Presidential Active Lifestyle Award Paper logs and online logs are both options for tracking activity 5x/week for 6 out of 8 weeks.
• Let's Move campaign about activity, gardening, drinking milk, and making good food choices.
• Let's Move: Active Schools has ideas about making systemic change in a school to include more physical activity. Geared toward US schools.
• Many well known charities dealing in health have education components too, like Jump Rope for Heart or the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

Saying no to underage drinking

You know your community and your students the best. Many Student Athlete Mentors will talk about this, please navigate this topic as you see fit.

• Safe & Sober: Alcohol's effect on teenage brain-animation (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY37BFmVxwQ
• Ask Listen Learn resources for 2016:
• Dealing with Peer Pressure
• The Importance of a Healthy Body
• Talking about alcohol (Suggestions for adults)
• A similar organization in the UK: Drink Aware
• “Talk: They hear you” campaign: Related to avoid unhealthy substances is the conversation about tobacco use, and especially e- cigarettes or vaping that seems to have a marketing approach aimed toward children.
• A teacher in the planning session recommended The Truth as a website for grades seven or so and up.

For olders: Body image

Please know your community before exploring these resources. Some ideas about body image were requested by some of our middle school teachers last year.

• Tread carefully on health quotes online. Many are disguised pro-eating disorder or encourage super unrealistic body images, often called Fitspo. If you have older students who might be looking at these unrealistic memes online, Buzzfeed did a really funny talk back to them. Find it here. Learn why Fitspo is dangerous in this Huffington Post article.
• Learn about the thigh gap trend in teens, and why it has to stop in this article.
• A round-up of body positive social media campaigns here. You might be familiar with Dove's Real Beauty campaign, six-minute video here about forensic artist who makes drawings of people based on their own overly critical descriptions. Or this one, where women chose between a door that labels them beautiful or not.
• Not only women struggle with body image. This photo project shows that "ideal" male bodies are really culturally specific. An honest article from a man about poor body image, and reactions to that article curated by him afterwards (Both from Huffington Post)

Healthy Living on the Page:

• The Lunch Lady books. A head lunchroom cook takes on crime with spy gadgets including a super spatula. Link: http://www.goodreads.com/search?q=lunch+lady
• Chew on this: Facts you don’t want to know about fast food. This is the teen companion to the book and movie Fast Food Nation. NYT book review here.
• Betty Crocker Kid’s Cookbook The Elvis themed banana smoothie is pretty good, actually. So is the chili.

• Foodie booklist for little learners

For Your Learning:

• Drop Dead Healthy: One man's humble quest for bodily perfection (Goodreads) Write AJ Jacobs is known for documenting his experimental learning projects (like reading the entire encyclopedia in a year, or living according to various interpretations of Biblical law for a year). In this book, Jacobs tackles everything from diet trends to alternative toilet seats. Laugh out loud funny in parts. Related TED Talk "How Living Healthy Almost Killed Me" here.
• A US government produced film from the 1950s about healthy eating. Ralph is a picky eater, and the soundtrack clearly has an opinion about that (cue villain music). Ralph has no pep.
• Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution is a cookbook (a really good one), a movement, and was a tv show briefly. He rails against the fact that few people know how to cook any more (especially low income people) and that American school lunches are worse than prison food. Twenty-one minute TED talk here. Pardon his swearing. He's English, and admits that he is ranting because he is so upset.
• NPR did an interesting story about cooking classes for English Language Learner adults, which is a really innovative way to connect culture and language. Link here.
• How Poor Sleep Impacts Mental Health in Students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DQ1ZRN9Gog
• CBS coverage Teens Pay the price for lack of sleep: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/teens-pay-price-for-lack-of-sleep/