Building Foundations: Developing Skills for Life

This publication is part of the Teenage Health Teaching Modules, a comprehensive health education curriculum for middle and high school students. This module uses award-winning middle school literature to teach the critical life skills of communication, decision making, and reaching goals. Most of the ten sessions begin with a passage from a novel, short story, or poem that illustrates a theme related to communication, decision making, or reaching goals. Students read, analyze, and write about the text and then focus on learning and practicing some aspect of the skill. It develops students’ literacy skills, as well as their life skills. The module may be taught in an interdisciplinary fashion by health educators and language arts teachers or reading specialists. It includes a videotape for teachers that features a health educator and a language arts teacher planning and teaching activities from the module.