The Healthy Eating and Active Time Club Curriculum: Teaching Children to Live Well

Early elementary years are perfect for instilling healthy habits in children—and The Healthy Eating and Active Time Club Curriculum: Teaching Children to Live Well offers you the resources and tools you need to instill those healthy habits.

The text helps children understand what a healthy diet is and how to stay physically active every day. The children learn how to make healthier nutrition and activity choices, and they discover how healthy eating and regular physical activity keep them feeling their best.

The Healthy Eating and Active Time Club Curriculum: Teaching Children to Live Well comes with a web resource that contains two sections. The first section supplies many reproducibles, including activity and food cards, worksheets, separate activity books for grades 1 to 3, and Cool Moves, which are warm-up and cool-down exercises for use in the classroom. This section also offers a chart that details how the curriculum meets Massachusetts state education standards (which have incorporated the common core standards) in English language arts; math; comprehensive health; history and social science; arts; and science, technology, and engineering.

The second section of the web resource contains a detailed book called After-School HEAT Club Curriculum. This web book reinforces the print book’s material and contains lessons and activities for after-school programs that extend the classroom learning and bring that learning to life. These activities include art projects, active games, food activities (including using healthy recipes), and ways to educate the entire family about healthy living.

The Healthy Eating and Active Time Club: Teaching Children to Live Well and its accompanying resources offer an array of tools for teachers:

• Grade-specific activity books on the web resource, allowing you to print out materials that you need for each lesson

• Extensions that connect the book’s content to physical education, library, and art

• Academic connections that help you incorporate the contents into comprehensive health, math, science and technology, language arts, social studies, and art lessons

• Background information that gives you everything you need to know and teach the lessons (including objectives, preparation, materials, and key talking points)

• A Go Green section in each lesson that helps you incorporate environmental messages into the lesson, if you so choose

The Healthy Eating and Active Time Club: Teaching Children to Live Well is a multifaceted resource that will help you engage students with activities that teach valuable lessons and life skills. Through this resource, students will learn the value of increasing their consumption of fruits, vegetables, low-fat milk, and whole grains; decrease their intake of foods high in saturated fat and sugar; and increase their time in physical activity. They will also learn how to decrease their screen time while discovering how to engage in environmentally friendly practices.

The Healthy Eating and Active Time Club: Teaching Children to Live Well is a win–win for you and your students.

Christina Economos is an internationally known expert in the field of childhood obesity prevention. Her research efforts focus on large-scale community-based participatory interventions with potential for scalability. Christina served as the principal investigator for Shape Up Somerville, which demonstrated a reduction in undesirable weight gain among elementary school students in an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse urban community.

Jessica Collins is a recognized public health leader in Massachusetts and a sought-after speaker at national events. She leads multisector collaborations to address emerging public health issues through sustainable systems changes. Jessica served as the project manager for Shape Up Somerville and director of the BEST Oral Health program, both of which are recognized nationally.

Sonya Irish Hauser is a professor and researcher in nutrition science. Her research and academic interests focus on community approaches to obesity prevention and novel methods of health promotion. Her research efforts have included rigorous testing of the HEAT Club curriculum in after-school programs across the United States.

Erin Hennessy is a behavioral scientist with advanced training in nutrition. Her research interests focus on the multilevel influences of eating and activity behavior among at-risk families. She has worked on several federal- and foundation-funded community-based interventions, including Shape Up Somerville. Dr. Hennessy has won numerous awards for her research, including those from the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and New Balance Foundation.

David Hudson is an expert in sustaining healthy communities, worksites, and schools through changes in policy, systems, and physical infrastructure. David served both as senior researcher coordinator and director of Shape up Somerville in collaboration with partners for those who live, work, and visit the city.

Erin Boyd Kappelhof is a registered dietitian who specializes in international nutrition communications. She primarily helps food and health organizations and companies define and disseminate their science-based messages to health professionals, consumers, and other audiences.

Sandra Klemmer is a clinical dietitian and also has a private nutrition practice. With an interest in health behavior change, Sandy was a staff member of the Shape Up Somerville project, and she explored the health behaviors of college students as a research assistant for the Tufts Longitudinal Health Study.

Claire Kozower has focused her career on the intersection of sustainable agriculture, nutrition, and community food security. She has many years of experience in nonprofit organic vegetable farms in the Northeast, including working on education staff, assisting with farm production, and serving as executive director. Her role with Shape Up Somerville included coordinating a farm-to-school program, school food service systems and infrastructure improvements, professional development and wellness opportunities for food service personnel, nutrition education for students and families, and after-school curriculum design and implementation.

Lori Marcotte is a curriculum developer who designs and implements comprehensive programs that aim to improve nutrition and phhysical activity behaviors in school-aged children. Her contributions reach students in the classroom as well as in out-of-school settings.