Just Health Action
What Makes a Community Healthy?
Young people have an opportunity to make it a beautiful day in their neighborhoods with an activity that asks them to identify what is healthy and unhealthy in their community and develop some ideas about what they can do to fix the...
Missouri Department of Elementary
Survivors
Developing a positive self-concept can sometimes be a challenge. Seventh graders engage in an activity that helps them identify their individual strengths and helps them recognize how these strengths can contribute to being a successful...
Nemours KidsHealth
Peer Pressure: Grades 9-12
Peer pressure is not always negative. It can also inspire, encourage people to get involved, and help push change. Class members select a quotation from a provided list and craft a paragraph about the meaning of the statement, how it...
PBS
Stories of Painkiller Addiction: The Cycle of Addiction
Drug addiction, including prescription drug addiction, begins with a reason that's different for every user. High schoolers learn more about the reasons people begin abusing drugs with a set of videos and worksheets that discuss four...
Curated OER
Express Yourself!
First graders examine positive ways to express their emotions. They act out a song to the tune of "London Bridge" and discuss different scenarios. After discussion, they complete a worksheet in which they circle the best action to take...
Curated OER
Healing Art: Health and Illness
Students examine African artifacts relating to health and illness
Curated OER
How We Feel
Students examine how their feelings make them unique. They read and discuss a poem, develop a list of feelings, and create a drawing of them feeling happy and healthy.
Florida Department of Health
Understanding the Risk of Substance Abuse Unit
Teenage brains are different! Understanding that the teenage brain is still developing and thus more impacted by substance abuse is the key concept in a three-lesson high school health unit. Participants learn about how the brain and...
Department of Education (Ireland)
Understanding Influences
"Understanding Influences," a richly detailed, carefully scaffolded unit, asks middle and high school scholars to examine how internal and external factors like friends, media, and society influence their attitudes and...
Department of Education (Ireland)
Assertive Communication
Assertive communication is an acquired skill. Teaching young people to ask for what they need and to believe that they have a right to ask is at the core of a unit on assertive communication. Over the course of the unit, middle and high...
Curated OER
Advocacy, Recognition, Prevention Through Art and Health
Students analyze how the environment and family history impacts personal health. In this personal health lesson, students discuss cancer and survey the school community about the disease. Students create a bulletin board about...
Curated OER
What's important? Knowing your facts, yourself and your role models
Third graders review safety rules about alcohol, tobacco and medicines. They learn healthy alternatives to using alcohol, tobacco and medicines. They recognize healthy and unhealthy choices
Curated OER
What Can I Do?
Here is a good way for children to identify ways to handle conflict. They discuss the connection between feelings and conflict. Everyone listens to a story about a conflict between two friends and they discuss what they could have done...
Curated OER
Rates of Puberty Change: Lesson 2
The class fills in a handout - How Appearances Change During Puberty. They then discuss the changes that both boys and girls go through and make some comparisons of the differences between boys and girls . Hopefully this class is a...
Nemours KidsHealth
Cyberbulling: Grades 6-8
Cyberbullying is the focus of two lessons. First, scholars discuss what cyberbullying is, and examine a problem-solving approach to handling cyberbullying, then create brochures on the topic. Second, pupils discuss the effects...
Nemours KidsHealth
Smoking: Grades 6-8
Light up middle schoolers' understanding of the monetary and health costs of smoking with two activities. First, class members calculate how much a smoker would spend in a year if they smoke a pack a week or a day. They then explore...
Health Smart Virginia
"SuperBetter" Stress Management
The goal of this Health Smart instructional activity is for freshmen to develop a personal system for coping with stress. They create a power-up list of things that make them feel happier, healthier, or better connected, identify people...
Health Smart Virginia
What's Up with Mindfulness
Mindfulness is all about paying attention to the present. Introduce freshmen to a stress-reducing tool that helps them pay close attention to what is happening, choose their behavior, and respond. Learners use a timeline to track their...
Health Smart Virginia
Suicide Prevention - Finding the Words
Acknowledge, Care, Tell! Freshmen learn how to ACT to help a friend demonstrating warning signs for depression and suicide in a carefully scaffolded, scripted lesson. Scholars also learn positive coping skills, information about support...
TeenMentalHealth
Know Before You Go Teacher’s Guide
A 124-page guide provides instructors with what they need to know before launching a seven-lesson thematic unit designed for high school seniors on issues they will face after graduation. Topics covered include mental health and...
Health Smart Virginia
Stress Management - Doctor Disease
Doctor, doctor, help me please! As part of their study of the correlation between disease and illness, middle schoolers take on the role of doctors. They rotate through 10 learning stations, read about patients' symptoms, and write a...
Curated OER
What Would You Do?
Students explain how we all face tough decisions everyday. They show how they respond to those events reveals who they are and where they are in their character/moral development. Students predict how to deal with peer pressure and...
Health Smart Virginia
The Do Over
Middle schoolers are offered an opportunity to use what they have learned about effective communication in a "Do-over." First, they create a storyboard of an argument they had with a friend or family member that wasn't productive. Then,...
Nemours KidsHealth
STDs: Grades 6-8
Many adults find it difficult to imagine that some middle schoolers are sexually active, and thus they shy away from discussing sexual activity with young people. However, misinformation and lack of information about such topics as STDs...