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I want to leave Abeka Health. What are my secular options?


rafiki
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Health is a big topic. You can break it down, and it grows every year. I have a list of "health" topics that I want to cover each year and then treat them separately - field trips and hands-on are great for elementary health.

 

Here are some of the topics I rotate in right now - later there will be more:

 

Safety:

basic first aid

fire safety - including stop, drop and roll, fire drills, and such

car safety - seat belts, air bags, looking for cars

bike and playground safety

gun safety

 

Fitness:

benefits of exercise

how the cardiovascular system works

how weight training benefits muscles

why you "warm-up" and "cool-down"

setting fitness goals and working towards them - my dd8 is planning to run a 5k with her dad.

taking a pulse

we rotate through different types of exercises - yoga, cycling, group sports and such to learn the rules

 

Hygiene

Learn about dental hygiene, tooth decay, gum disease, role of nutrition

learn about how personal hygiene relates to development - body hair, acne, body odor, etc..

 

Nutrition -

there's lots here from reading labels to understanding digestion

 

 

Emotional health -

identify basic emotions

bullying

peer groups

seeking help and coping skills

 

Drug and substance abuse -

identify poisons

teach that medications should only be taken with adult supervision

talk about tobacco and its effects on the body

 

Strangers violence and abuse

this is a big one - cover it all the time. privacy, rights of a child, right to be safe, how to deal with strangers, what to do if you are lost, what to do if someone hurts you or threatens to.

 

 

The Magic School Bus Human Body collection of videos covers a good deal of the health and fitness material. For the rest, I just have a list and make sure we get to all of it although much of it happens in the realm of informal discussions.

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Carmen, have you used any of her other books? Any comments on any of them?

 

Rosie

I was planning to purchase this one. I haven't used any of them. :D Rainbow Resource has a review that made it sound really great with activities and experiments. One is using their dirty hands to make a culture in tomato soup (I am assuming that you also make one with clean hands for comparison).

 

I searched and searched and found no other secular options for this age group, though I am sure that a public school text might work. (K12 or Galore Park maybe, I didn't check to see if they had them.) There are some science programs that throw health in with the science.

 

I feel like I am mispelling everything today, please excuse me if I am. I have never gotten the spell-check to work on here.

Edited by Lovedtodeath
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I don't use anything in particular for health. I pick some topics and we discuss them. Sometimes I get a library book or find something online. I consider many things we do as part of daily living to be related to health (brush your teeth, eat good food, get rest and exercise, take care of yourself).

 

 

:iagree:

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  • 1 month later...
Healthy Me (ages 4-8) But you are needing it for older kids, aren't you?

 

Carmen, have you used any of her other books? Any comments on any of them?

 

Rosie

Okay, we will start Healthy Me, next week. About half of the activities are useable. There are 4 sections:

 

Germs and cleanliness: One of the germ activities that sounds really cool requires a special light (maybe we can go to Chucki Cheese's for the experiment?) Another requires a microscope. Then there is one that has you testing parts of your house for germs. I don't want to do that one because our house is VERY dirty and it will just cause DD to nag at me all of the time about it and there is nothing I can do about it.

 

Dental Health: very much what I learned in Public School. Cheesy activities with about half of them being unrelated (create a work of art with a gum cleaner, dental floss, and toothbrushes, for example).

 

Nutrition: Well, refined pretzels are listed as a good snack. Typical misinformation.

 

Exercise: This seems okay.

 

Overall I was most excited about the cleanliness part in the description and it does look like it has the bulk of informative experiments. If you have to do a health course to meet state standards this will fill the bill, as I remember a lot of the cheesy time-wasting activities and misinformation from my days in Public School. I will probably use about 1/4 of the book.

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