Celebrating Healthy Choices

Planning for Red Ribbon Week, National Prevention Week, or another special week-long celebration?

The school year is full of exciting celebrations and observances that are opportunities to bring your students and school together to support a cause or honor a notable local hero. We thought it would be a great idea to take advantage of these school-wide events to add a little learning and bonding to the mix.

Celebrating Healthy Choices is a research-based activity series for Kindergarten through Grade 5 that blends self-efficacy and interpersonal skills practice with fun activities to bring your students together.

Celebrating Healthy Choices promotes school-wide connectedness through fun and engaging activities to promote skill development, bonding, and shared experiences.

Celebrating Healthy Choices introduces five essential character development skills to promote self-efficacy, healthy development, and academic success:

  • Setting Reachable Goals
  • Making Responsible Decisions
  • Bonding with Pro-Social Others
  • Identifying and Managing Emotions
  • Communicating Effectively

Activities begin with a school-wide opening assembly introducing students to the concept of healthy choices. Use the opening assembly to involve family and community members. Invite community leaders, healthcare professionals, law enforcement officers, or athletes to share their inspirational stories about making healthy choices.

Tuesday through Thursday, each grade level will explore the fundamentals of a social skill to ready them to make healthy choices in life. Students learn a fun rap to reinforce what they learned and share with the rest of the school.

Students come together at the end of the week to celebrate what they learned, to perform the rap they learned in their classes, and to make a pledge to continue making healthy choices.

The CHC strategies and theoretical framework apply the Social Development Model to promote and develop protective factors:

  • Bonding to family, school, pro-social peers, and community
  • Clear standards or norms of behavior  

CHC applies the Social Learning Theory to promote positive social norms and expectations through the setting of positive expectations to promote self-efficacy and the modeling of positive behaviors to support norms that reject substance use or antisocial behaviors.  CHC promotes the development and reinforcement of the social emotional competency skills associated with substance-free and peace-building norms and expectations. 

Health Behavior Theory is applied in the promotion of social supports and expectations through a school-wide positive climate promotion and support.

Each Celebrating Healthy Choices kit includes everything the Program Coordinator and the Teachers will need to deliver the program.

Kit contents include:

Coordinator Manual
The program kit includes an easy to follow guide to planning the week's events including sample scripts for the opening and closing ceremonies, a suggested itinerary of events and activities, a planning checklist, lesson overviews, and parent letters.

Teacher Manual
Each grade level of CHC includes 3 scripted 20-minute activities. The teacher Manual includes lyric sheets, in-class lesson extenders, take-home activities, pledge sheet, and puppet cutouts.

Visual Aids
Colorful posters and other visual aids help reinforce what students learn in the lessons.

Program materials are optimized to get you started with minimal preparation.

Tamara W., Prevention Specialist, Coastal Bend Wellness Foundation

“Too Good for Drugs paired with an effective, trusted adult ensures the opportunity for all youth to be confident, respectful, trusted, caring achievers.”

Tamara W., Prevention Specialist, Coastal Bend Wellness Foundation

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