Recently 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.

Their work, Publishing Guidelines for Incorporating Health Criteria into School Curriculum , comes at a good time for millions of students. Following on First Lady Michelle Obama’s outspoken leadership for child health and wellness with her Let’s Move! Initiative,

According to the website, “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.”

What is interesting about these new publishing guidelines is they are providing roadmaps to lesson planning that any school can incorporate readily. This working group of the AAP, AEP and NASBE has invented something that could be new core curricula standards for schools to educate with around health criteria.

Also according to the website, Karen Ellis, helped to inform the creation of the guidelines, working with several very respected organizations.

To learn more about Karen Ellis and her work with student and school wellness, visit her profile.