Personal and Community Health
Grade 9 - 12
Overview
Health policies and local environmental health conditions have an impact on individuals’ health. Students this age are more aware of their community beyond home and school, making high school an important time to analyze health issues that are challenging their greater community, including environmental concerns. Health education teachers are in an influential position to empower their students to value and respect their personal health and to positively impact students’ current and future health practices. High school provides opportunities to implement standards-based instructional strategies that will lead to more advanced personal and community health competencies.
Information and Resources
California Department of Public Health Office of AIDS
The California Department of Public Health Office of AIDS provides safe needle education/syringe-exchange programs, information, and resources.
Healthy People 2030
Healthy People 2030 sets data-driven national objectives to improve health and well-being over the next decade.
Curriculum and Lessons
National Geographic Learning
Interdisciplinary COVID-19 teaching resources, including presentations, worksheets and teacher's notes, to use with K-12 learners in online classes.
Public Health Advocacy Curriculum
This ten-lesson curriculum combines classroom- and community-based activities for high school students to learn about the upstream or root causes of health, and to become health advocates.
Sleep Education – Sleep Lesson Plans for K-12 Teachers
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine has developed K-12 lessons and activities to generate interest in the study of sleep medicine and raise awareness of sleep disorders.
California Environmental Literacy Initiative
California Environmental Literacy Initiative: Teacher Resources
Practical Resources for Taking School Outside during the Pandemic and Beyond
Healthy Teeth, Bright Futures: K-12 Oral Health Curriculum
This K-12 Oral Health curriculum was designed for Oregon school districts and developed by The Healthy Teeth Bright Futures Coalition. Curriculum in English and Spanish.
Documentaries
Grade 9 - 12
Partnerships
Partnering with the Family
- To promote their family’s and community’s health and wellbeing, students design and create a monthly or quarterly health newsletter or opt-in informational email for parents, guardians, or caretakers on various personal and community health topics studied in class.
Partnering with your School
- Working with school administrators and parent volunteers, students plan, implement, and evaluate a health resources fair.
- Another activity provides students with the opportunity to analyze their school’s safety plan for alignment with the health education standards.
- Students critically analyze their school’s safety plan and research other school-safety best practices online; align the plan to the health education standards; and provide recommendations for administrators and the school nurse to consider.
Partnering with your Community
- Community Health Promotion in Action: Students apply a decision-making model to a personal health issue they are experiencing by writing their discoveries in a reflective summary. Students then choose one community or environmental health issue of interest to them and apply the model, summarizing any observations. Finally, students share their summaries on a community or environmental health issue by presenting them to a local government or health-based nonprofit agency.
- Another activity that promotes community wellness and encourages student involvement in societal and environmental conditions to benefit the health of their community is for students to research advocacy activities of various local nonprofit chapters such as the American Cancer Society, American Diabetes Association, and The Nature Conservancy of California (see EarthShare California for a list of environmental agencies).
- Students use those local activities as models to organize smaller school-based events to bring health education awareness to the school.