What is health education?
Health education builds and encourages students' knowledge, skills, and positive attitudes about healthy lifestyle choices. Health education includes mental, emotional, physical and social health. Health education helps motivate students by improving and maintaining their health, preventing disease, and reducing risky behaviors.
What is health education?
Health education is a combination of learning experiences created to help individuals and communities improve their overall health, by increased knowledge or influencing their attitudes for healthier choices.
According to this definition, physical, social, and psychological factors all contribute to overall health. Wellness is then expressed through the integration of the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, social, and environmental components called the Six Dimensions of Health.
Why is health education important?
The main purpose health education is to teach about physical, mental, emotional and social health. Health education enhances the quality of life for all people and the instruction helps students learn skills to make healthy choices for a healthier lifestyle.
Physical health
Physical health is one of the components of health and can be defined as the absence of diseases or disability of the body parts. Physical health can also be defined as the ability to perform routine tasks without any physical restriction. To learn more about physical wellness health lessons for students in grades K-12, visit our nutrition and fitness activities page.
Mental health
Mental health is a major component of overall wellness and can often lead to physical health issues if certain conditions are not managed in a healthy way. Sometimes it can be really difficult to tell if a person is struggling with mental health issues, but at other times they may show obvious symptoms. They may be exhibiting risky behaviors that require intervention. To learn more about mental health lessons for students in grades K through 12, visit our mental health lessons page.
Emotional health
Emotional health is another important part of overall wellness. People who are emotionally healthy are usually in control of their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Being emotionally healthy also means you are aware of your emotions allowing you to cope in healthy ways. regardless if they are positive or negative. To learn more on emotional wellness for students in grades K-12, visit https://learntobehealthy.org/lessons-and-activities/mental-health .
Social health
Social Health is a very important component of health and wellness. Social health is considered to be the ability to create and maintain “acceptable” and “proper” communication with other people in a social situation. Maintaining social health includes having a sense of own identity and being able to share, cooperate, communicate, and enjoy being around others. Social health includes having and maintaining friendships, being involved with your family and community life. To learn more social wellness health lessons for students in grades K-12, visit https://learntobehealthy.org/lessons-and-activities/mental health.
Educating students with preventive health education early in life, will help them make healthier choices when they are faced with a variety of stressors in life. Health education in for students in K-12 is provided on a variety of platforms. The Byrnes Health Education Center’s digital platform www.LearntobeHealthy.org provides over 142 standards-based lesson plans and activities for students in grades K-12. The 7 health topics available on www.LearntobeHealthy.org are:
- Nutrition & Fitness for grades K-12
- Mental Health for grades K-12
- Oral Health for grades K-3
- The Five Senses for grades K-3
- Tobacco & Inhalants for grades 4-6
- Adolescence (Puberty) for grades 4-6
- Substance Abuse for grades 7-9
A LearntobeHealthy membership includes teacher and student licenses to access a personalized, interactive Health Log and all 13 of our eLearning Kits (documents available in Spanish). Each kit includes 9 to 17 related activities that have accompanying lesson plans, answer keys and supplementary materials. The activities also provide the opportunity to incorporate cross-curricular assignments in science, math, and writing. Click here to preview 4 sample activities for your students, https://www.learntobehealthy.org/samples/ . For immediate access to all lesson plans and content on LearntobeHealthy.org, click here https://www.learntobehealthy.org/store/ to join today!
To learn more visit www.LearntobeHealth.org or call 717-848-3064.
Next steps:
To learn more on emotional wellness for students in grades K-12, visit https://learntobehealthy.org/lessons-and-activities/mental-health.
To learn more about intellectual wellness health lessons for students in grades K-12, visit https://www.learntobehealthy.org/lessons-and-activities/.
To learn more social wellness health lessons for students in grades K-12, visit https://learntobehealthy.org/lessons-and-activities/mental-health .
To learn more about physical wellness health lessons for students in grades K-12, visit https://learntobehealthy.org/lessons-and-activities/nutrition-and-fitness.
To journal daily nutrition, physical activity and overall mood, visit LearntobeHealthy.org Individualized Health Log, https://www.learntobehealthy.org/lessons-and-activities/health-log/.