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The Growing Healthy curriculum is based on the premise that if children understand how their bodies work and appreciate the factors that affect their health -- biological, social, and environmental -- they will be more likely to establish good habits during their formative years. "More successes early on lead to more successes later in life," explains Lynne Whitt of the National Center for Health Education, which developed the program. Growing Healthy addresses not only the physical, but also the emotional and social, dimensions of health. Exercises provide students with knowledge that will help them resist pressures to smoke, drink alcohol, or engage in other health-compromising behaviors later in life. In one Growing Healthy activity, fifth graders build a smoking simulator from an empty plastic bottle and a lit cigarette. As the bottle fills with smoke, the students are provided with visual evidence of the dangers of smoking.
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