Comprehensive Health Unit Samples
Kindergarten
Kindergarten
Unit Title: Healthy Relationships
Unit Description: This unit provides an opportunity for students to develop communication skills for establishing and maintaining healthy relationships. They will learn how to identify trusted adults, recognize personal space and boundaries, and begin to self-advocate in unsafe situations. Students will explore aspects of nonverbal and verbal communication, respect for self and others and levels of danger and emergency contacts. The unit concludes with students taking on the role of a puppet master to create a puppet show for their peers depicting teacher prompted scenarios to include an unsafe situation, identifying the trusted adults, and how to communicate verbally and/or nonverbally for help.
Focus Disciplines: Comprehensive Health + Physical Education + Science
Unit Description: This unit explores variation in movement patterns in relation to one’s place in space. Students will demonstrate the concepts of motion using their bodies in a safe manner. Through the exploration of various animals, students will mimic their locomotion through body movement. The unit concludes with the students becoming a zoo animal and acting out its unique movement styles.
1st Grade
Unit Title: Express Myself
Unit Description: This unit uses listening skills and appropriate expression of emotions to help students develop their understanding of healthy and positive communication skills and problem-solving strategies. Through the examination of both verbal and non-verbal communication and examples of polite and empathetic responses, students will actively explore various forms of communication. The unit culminates with students creating a poster project that depicts a problem and solution using problem solving strategies they have learned though out the unit. The ongoing learning experiences center around role-playing as a means to scaffold and equip students with lifelong skills.
Integrated Unit Title: Buddy Builders
Focus Disciplines: Comprehensive Health + Physical Education
Unit Description: This unit implements a variety of learning experiences that allow students to develop their positive communication skills. The concepts of cooperation, teamwork, responsible social behavior, critical thinking and reasoning, space, communication, and problem-solving skills are the main focus of this integrated comprehensive health and physical education unit. The culminating performance assessment for this unit has students working in small groups to build an object and requires students to utilize skills of team building, communication, and problem-solving in order to complete the task.
2nd Grade
Unit Title: Be a “Buddy” not a “Bully”
Unit Description: This unit uses friendship relationships to help students develop their understanding of healthy interpersonal relationships as well as unhealthy bullying relationships. Through the examination of effective communication skills (speaking and listening) and perspective-comprehension strategies, students will actively explore proactive anti bullying and empathy-building activities. The unit culminates with students creating (audience) interactive skits to share their perspective on bullying prevention. The ongoing learning experiences center around role-playing as a means to scaffold and prepare students for the creation of their own skits.
Integrated Unit Title: Communication at Its Best!
Focus Disciplines: Comprehensive Health + Reading, Writing, and Communicating
Unit Description: In this unit, students will develop strategies to build healthy relationships that create respect and empathy toward others. A focus will be on enhancing skills such as positive communication, distinguishing between teasing and bullying, reading grade-level text with purpose and understanding and reading grade-level text orally with accuracy, appropriate rate, and expression. The unit concludes with students sorting qualities of teasing and bullying into a t-chart and creating a storyboard with a bullying scenario and resolution.
3rd Grade
Unit Title: Communication Works for Everyone
Unit Description: This unit addresses positive communication skills as it relates to personal needs, boundaries, and pro-social behavior in order to establish healthy relationships. Through the examination of effective communication skills students will investigate the importance of positive decision-making in order to enhance elements of healthy relationships such as advocacy, cooperation, consideration and respect. Across the unit students will explore boundary setting, verbal and non-verbal communication strategies and definitions/attributes of sportsmanship.
Integrated Unit Title: How About We All Communicate?
Focus Disciplines: Comprehensive Health + Reading, Writing, and Communicating
Unit Description: In this unit, students will study perspectives and point of view in order understand conflict, both personal and literary, so they can use it for decision making, interpersonal communication, and creating healthy boundaries. Additionally, students will study how cause and effect relationships are present in different types of texts in order to understand the relationships between concepts, ideas, and actions. Students will use cause and effect vocabulary to explain causal relationships. The unit culminates with students working with a team of peers to create a news segment that will inform the student body about effective strategies for problem solving with others.
4th Grade
Unit Title: Safety
Unit Description: This unit is designed to build upon basic decision-making skills and incorporate higher level communication behaviors needed to manage external influences such as interpersonal relationships, peer pressure and social media. The development of these tools will allow students to become better equipped to deal with potential life experiences such as resolving conflicts, maintaining personal safety, and protecting personal boundaries. The ultimate goal of this unit is to provide students with the confidence and knowledge to develop healthy relationships and maintain overall health and wellness. It concludes with students analyzing social dilemma scenarios to design a role play that depicts the negative choice followed by a depiction of a positive resolution.
Integrated Unit Title: Nutrition Castaways
Focus Disciplines: Comprehensive Health + Physical Education
Unit Description: This unit implements a variety of learning experiences that provides students with opportunities to develop their understanding of nutrition, calories, healthy lifestyle choices and the F.I.T.T. (Frequency, Intensity, Time and Type of exercise) Principle. The concepts of choices, lifestyle habits, body signals, health, wellness, and the identification of nutritional value are the main focus of this integrated comprehensive health and physical education unit. An active game called “Nutrition Island” requires students to utilize their nutritional knowledge and provides the culminating assessment for this unit.
5th Grade
Unit Title: Human Growth & Development
Unit Description: This unit examines the structure and function of body systems and the changes that occur as we mature. Throughout the unit students will explore the physical and emotional characteristics of the maturation process, make personal connections to their individual growth and development, and establish positive coping skills. The unit culminates in a performance assessment that asks students to help their peers recognize the natural changes that occur to human bodies at developmental stages.
Integrated Unit Title: Building Diverse Relationships
Focus Disciplines: Comprehensive Health + Reading, Writing, and Communicating
Unit Description: This unit allows students to study how various personal and interpersonal factors influence individual’s choices that may result in lack of respect for or intolerance of differences. Additionally, as short term and long-term consequences from bullying are accessed, students will have opportunities to recognize the power and importance of positive communication and acceptance of others. Reading strategies, elements of narrative text and characterization will be integrated throughout the learning experiences to support the development of skills such as pro-social behavior, inclusion and healthy relationships. The unit concludes with students reading a short story about bullying. They will then annotate the story for bullying consequences and positive pro-social behaviors to finally create a news story sharing alternatives to bullying.
6th Grade
Unit Title: Communication is the Key
Unit Description: This unit examines healthy relationships through the lens of decision making, communication, and self-advocacy. Students will learn that setting boundaries and clear expectations play a critical role in developing healthy relationships and through this, they will evaluate how good decision making reflects and maintains physical, social, and emotional boundaries and beliefs. Assessing one’s risk behaviors and developing safety strategies may reduce consequences such as unintended pregnancy, contracting sexually transmitted infections (STI’s), and HIV/AIDS. Additionally, students will identify key support systems in their school, community, and personal lives that may be able to be advocates and resources.
The unit concludes with students assuming the role of a “game master” to create a state-of-the-art game that analyzes the benefits of positive communication, sets clear expectations and boundaries, evaluates risk behaviors with unintended consequences, and determines benefits of adult support/guidance.
Unit Title: Healthy Bodies
Unit Description: This unit examines healthy bodies through the lens of physical health by building skills such as accessing reliable information and positive decision making to improve nutrition, physical activity, safety, and hygiene. These positive decisions may also impact emotions, reactions, confidence, and social relationships. Students will also look at the short- and long-term health consequences of positive nutrition and physical activity decisions. The unit culminates with a performance assessment that has students create a web page that advocates for a balanced lifestyle to be posted on a “Middle School Wellness Website”.