Healthy Habits Snapshot

Teaching young people about developing and sustaining healthy habits is important as it can help by preventing health conditions such as obesity and diabetes to improve mental health, increased confidence, better social skills, resilience, and a more positive outlook. A healthy lifestyle will give the young people a strong foundation of physical and mental benefits. This will set them up for the rest of their lives.
 
Using the National Curriculum, we have linked as many opportunities as possible to support the delivery of healthy habits through a range of different subject areas. These opportunities can be used to either deliver the topic as a stand-alone or through cross-curricular planning with a number of different subject areas, depending on the focus of the school.
The suggested lessons allow you to broadly focus on mental health topics using the 10 fundamentals and the five-step process. It's important to link these to youth social action and how learning can make a difference.
 
Each lesson plan lightly integrates the learning or practice of a specific life/employability skill, such as oracy, teamwork, reflection, and/or problem-solving. In addition, each lesson links learning to potential youth social projects that other young people have delivered to make a difference.
 
Additional Resources

1. When can we teach about Healthy Habits? – Curriculum Integration
   (Relationship, Sex and Health Education, Personal, Social, Health Education, Citizenship, Science, RE, English, Music, Art, and Information technology)
2. Key dates to raise mental health and well-being throughout the year.
3. Background Reading
• Background Information-KS 1
• Background Information-KS 2
• Background Information-KS3&4

 
Teaching Healthy Habits

Key Stage 1	Key stage 2
Lesson 1 - What helps me feel well? Lesson 2 - When is food giving me energy? Lesson 3 - What can my body do with energy? Lesson 4 - How can I share what I have learnt about health with my family/people important in my life?	Lesson 1 - What is a healthy system? Lesson 2 - How do food and physical activity interact with physical and emotional health? Lesson 3 - How can I take action about my health? Lesson 4 - How can I take action to help people stay healthy in my school/ local area or somewhere in the world?

Key Stages 3 and 4
Lesson 1 - Who influences our food choices? Lesson 2 - How can we make healthy food choices? Lesson 3 - Understand the consequences of imbalances in the diet, including obesity, starvation, and deficiency diseases. Lesson 4 - How can we tackle malnutrition? Lesson 5 - Debate: our food systems and the complexity of their problems

 

Case Studies
Authors: Sonia Berglund, Mahreen Hassan and Samia Akram Edited: James Murray Quality Assured by: TBC