Health Literacy Month is a time for organizations and individuals to promote the importance of understandable health information and this week, SHAPE America  introduced its first ever Health Education Youth Empowerment Series to help students develop the skills they need to make decisions and implement change in their own lives and the lives of others.  The first unit, comprised of five lessons for middle school students, is called “Advocating for Healthy Nutrition Habits.”

Educators can download a free copy of SHAPE America’s Health Education Youth Empowerment Series to use in their classrooms.

Each 50-minute lesson agenda includes instant activities to start the lesson, learning activities to help students acquire functional knowledge and become proficient in the National Health Education Standards (NHES) skill focused on in the unit and closure activities to conclude the lesson.  Ideas for lesson assessment, differentiation, homework and incorporating technology are also included.

The first unit includes lessons on:

• introduction of advocacy and nutrition
• understanding food needs and differences among individuals
• choosing healthy beverages
• food availability and how this influences food choices
• sharing the message of healthy eating.

“Our new Youth Empowerment Series is intended to generate educational opportunities for middle school students to practice healthy behaviors and positively influence those around them about good health. We want to help young people to develop the necessary skills, gain the ability and authority to make appropriate decisions.”  Fran Cleland, SHAPE America President

I downloaded the Empowerment Series from the SHAPE America website and was immediately impressed with the way in which each lesson is structured. The learning objectives are clear, the learning activities are engaging and well paced, and the assessments are not only simple to administer but might inspire teachers to improve upon any pre-existing assessments that are looking to improve upon.

In my opinion SHAPE America have worked hard at advocating for us health teachers and providing us with great resources – all of which can be found on their site. The #SHAPEHealthEd twitter chats have been extremely successful and you can find them archived here. If you are interested in being a future guest on the twitter chats please contact me.

Here are this week’s #slowchathealth questions. Answer them one by one as they are tweeted daily, or answer them all once. Let’s keep this conversation going!

Q1 Health Literacy Heroes identify health problems & act to solve them. In what ways are you a Health Literacy Hero? #slowchathealth

Q2 Health Literacy Heroes identify health problems & act to solve them. What are you doing to create future Health Literacy Heroes? #slowchathealth

Q3 What super powers do Health Literacy Heroes have? (This would be a great question to ask your students) #slowchathealth

Q4 Complete the sentence. Kryptonite is to Superman as (blank) is to Health Literacy Heroes. #slowchathealth

Q5 Who is YOUR Health Literacy Hero? #slowchathealth

*The Health Education Youth Empowerment Series was written by the following members of the Advocacy & Nutrition Task Force: Holly Alperin, chair, University of New Hampshire; Jessica Harcarik, Southampton, MD, Middle School; Erin Lumpkins, District of Columbia Public Schools and Joe Halowich of SHAPE America.