Super Health, Super You is an educational program designed to initiate healthy lifestyle conversations in upper elementary classrooms and school communities across the country, focusing especially on high-need areas. This program aims to address the rise in chronic health conditions such as diabetes and obesity by helping students make healthier choices.
Super Health, Super You offers standards-aligned lesson plans, classroom activities, and family activities that teach the importance of health, exercise, and nutrition to give students the tools necessary to make healthier choices. These resources are available free of charge on the Super Health, Super You website. Educators from across the country were involved in the ideation of these resources and continue to be a source of guidance as the program grows and evolves, ensuring that the materials created are filling a need in the classroom.
STRATEGY: Super Health, Super You’s educational resources center on 9-year-old Cristina, who comes from a large Latina family where her mother and grandmother both suffer from diabetes. Each classroom resource begins with a continuation of Cristina’s story as she learns new lessons about how to keep herself and her family healthy. Cristina is relatable to students, since and they may face similar situations in their own lives. Christina’s story evokes an emotional response that helps students stay engaged with the material.
Family toolkits and activities ensure that lessons about health and wellness continue outside of the classroom. Since students learn habits and routines from their parents and families, The Tree of Life encourages parents to discuss family history as it relates to health.
Classroom and at-home resources were designed with cross-functionality in mind, with applicable ties to other areas like language arts, science, and social studies. These tie-ins to other subjects allow the program to reach classrooms across disciplines, inviting students to explore connections with other topics that interest them.
IMPLEMENTATION: The Super Health, Super You program launched in August 2016 with a marketing campaign designed to expose educators to these resources and encourage their use in the classroom.
In addition to lesson plans and activities, Super Health, Super You hosts an annual community challenge that encourages educators to take action with their students to make their school community a healthier place. Entrants identify a health-related issue or threat in their community and describe how they would solve it with a prize of $10,000. Entries are scored on criteria including community need, impact of action plan, student involvement, planning and execution, among others.
We have received over 100 entries over the past two years. Each year, three winning schools were chosen as winners and received a $10,000 grant to help make their ideas a reality. Winning projects have featured superhero-themed climbing walls, wellness gardens, community fitness programs, playground equipment, new and improved drinking fountains, and more. These ideas, inspired by the Super Health, Super You curriculum, will continue to help students make real change in communities across the country.
The Super Health, Super You program has had a profound impact on encouraging healthy lifestyle conversations since it was launched. Since its launch, Super Health, Super You has reached over one million students and has had over 13,000 resource downloads. In two separate surveys, educators overwhelmingly reported finding the lessons helpful and half of the respondents said after exploring the Super Health, Super You resources, their students were more interested in making healthy and active lifestyle choices. Half of respondents also said that their students were more knowledgeable on how to make healthier choices.
By tapping into Discovery Education’s access to 4.5 million educators and 50 million students, this program was also promoted via targeted outreach to key regions and audiences; media campaign on DiscoveryEducation.com, a top teacher site with over 2.2 million monthly visitors; education trade press; social media; direct-to-teacher targeted e-blasts and e-newsletter callouts; local Discovery Education community blog posts; and grassroots outreach to Discovery Education’s influential teacher community.
