Healthy Active Living
Food Faces and Salsa Gardens: Fostering Healthy Habits with Young Children [PDF, 806KB]
Ever wonder what staff can do to promote children’s health? Learn why and how to promote healthy habits for children’s nutrition, physical activity, and safety. Also, discover ways to help families continue healthy habits at home.
Strategies to Support and Encourage Healthy Active Living Course
The Strategies to Support and Encourage Healthy Active Living course is an online, interactive self-study course for Head Start and Early Head Start staff focused on healthy active living. Learners will practice building skills to effectively communicate and engage with families around creating and maintaining a healthy, active lifestyle.
Health Services Newsletter: Healthy Active Living (July 2014)
Health managers are in a position to support and enhance the healthy, active living initiatives Head Start programs provide to children and their families. This edition of the newsletter offers strategies to engage staff and parents.
Healthy Active Living Resources – A Virtual Tour
View this virtual tour of the Healthy Active Living Resources—the Growing Healthy Flipchart and 5, 2, 1, 0 worksheet. These educational tools were designed to support and engage Head Start staff as they partner with families in healthy eating and active living. The short video provides guidance on how to effectively use these resources to educate staff and families.
Growing Healthy Flipchart [PDF, 3.1MB]
Healthy habits start early in life. Encouraging and supporting very young children to enjoy active play and choose healthy foods can set a lifelong pattern of healthy active living. There are lots of ways to grow healthy but you don't have to do them all at once. The 5-2-1-0 message provides suggestions for building healthy, active lives for everyone. Staff can share this information with parents as a reminder to make healthy choices every day. Available in Spanish (español) [PDF, 3.2MB]
These supplemental pages look at serving sizes for the different age groups and how they are different from adult portions. There are talking points for home visitors to use with families when discussing how to develop healthy meal routines.
Feeding Your 9 month old [PDF, 941KB]
Feeding Your Toddler [PDF, 980B]
Feeding Your Preschooler [PDF, 1MB]
Growing Healthy Family Goals Worksheet
All parents know that they should teach their children to eat healthy and encourage them to exercise. However, that can be hard to do, especially when it feels like everything about your current lifestyle needs to change. Head Start and Early Head Start staff may use this worksheet with families to help them start behaviors that will improve the health and wellness of everyone at home. The 5-2-1-0 message provides suggestions for building healthy, active lives for everyone in the family.
Growing Healthy Family Postcard
The 5-2-1-0 message provides suggestions for building healthy, active lives for everyone in the family. Staff can share this postcard with parents to put on the refrigerator as a reminder to make healthy choices every day.
Active Play: Tips for Families [PDF, 368KB]
Head Start health managers and family service staff can use this fact sheet to share information with families on the NCH priority, active play. It includes tips families can use to help young children develop positive active play behaviors. Available in Spanish (español) [PDF, 93KB]
I Am Moving, I Am Learning Interactive Tool
The I Am Moving, I Am Learning (IMIL) tool is filled with quick and easy ideas for integrating movement, nutrition, and healthy habits into everyday life. It may be useful to home visitors, classroom teachers, and other caregivers. Learn to add more movement into art and to enhance nutrition concepts in group or circle time.
Let’s Move! Child Care
OHS encourages programs to participate in Let's Move! Child Care (LMCC). LMCC invites child care providers throughout the country, including Head Start and Early Head Start programs, to adopt healthy policies and practices around physical activity and nutrition for children. The initiative aligns with both the Head Start Child Development and Early Learning Framework and the Head Start Program Performance Standards. The five goals of LMCC include increased physical activity, reduced screen time, eating healthy foods, reducing the consumption of sugary beverages and encouraging breastfeeding for infants. Discover how LMCC strategies and materials can support the healthy, active living goals in your program.
Little Voices for Healthy Choices
OHS's Little Voices for Healthy Choices was designed for infants and toddlers ages birth to 3 years of age. Early Head Start managers and classroom staff are encouraged to explore the introductory video and three webinars that present strategies around music, movement, brain development, nutrition, and sleep.
Last Reviewed: October 2016
Last Updated: October 31, 2016