“Publishing Guidelines for Incorporating Health Criteria Into School Curriculum” Released
The National Association of State Boards of Education (NASBE), Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), Association of American Publishers (AAP), and the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) collaborated to create voluntary publishing guidelines to help fight the epidemic of childhood obesity.
In recognition of the development of these publishing guidelines, the Let’s Move! initiative celebrated the working groups at a White House event on May 22, 2013. To read more about the event, please visit the Let’s Move! blog.
The guidelines suggest methods to incorporate appropriate information and examples in the areas of nutrition, physical education/activity, and healthy behaviors in a wide range of subject categories from history to science to language arts. The goal of the guidelines is to raise publishers’ consciousness about the use of health-focused language in all educational texts, wherein math books have students multiplying apples and not cupcakes, writing lessons have students drafting public service announcements that support healthy eating, and science lessons teach students how to calculate their BMIs.
To download the “Publishing Guidelines for Incorporating Health Criteria Into School Curriculum,” please visit our Industry Resources page.
The AAP, AEP, and NASBE working groups – with educational expertise spanning kindergarten through 12th grade – developed these publishing guidelines incorporating the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. The working groups combined recommendations from First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! initiative and national health education standards, with core curricula standards developed nationally and by states throughout the country. The publishing guidelines also align with the Whole Child approach to education, which is designed to ensure that each student is healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged.
MMS Education’s Principal, Karen Ellis, helped to inform the creation of the guidelines, working with industry executives from Getty Images, Scholastic, Weekly Reader, the Girl Scouts, and several other respected organizations.
To learn more about Karen Ellis and her work with student and school wellness, please visit her profile.