For the past 10 years, I've used the month of May to bring my school community together through a variety of health-based programs, challenges, and advocacy pieces. I call the whole initiative "Health Month" and it honestly helped transform the way my school focused on health and wellness.

Health Month is an opportunity for you to boost your program's visibility, strengthen partnerships and relationships with families, engage your faculty, and - most importantly - create fun, memorable, learning-based experiences for your students!

The initiative can be broken down into five parts:

🗓 Month-Long Challenges

💪 Physical Activity Week

🧠 Mental Health Week

🍎 Nutrition Week

😴 Sleep Week

Although I cover each of these parts in the podcast, feel free to check out the five blog posts I wrote to complement this episode to see some of the visuals I created and find even more details on Health Month's different resources and challenges. Just click the links above to jump to each blog post!

The version of Health Month that I share in this episode is the product of ten years of tinkering, designing, listening, and evolving. That said, you can access all of the resources I've created for Health Month (including the email templates I sent to parents) in the Health Month Teacher Pack. 

This year has been incredibly tough on schools and their communities (not to mention their physical education teachers!) I know from experience that Health Month has the power to unite your school's community all while positioning you as the healthy school champion who makes that happen. I hope that this episode - in combination with the Health Month blog post mini-series and the Health Month Teacher Pack - provides you with everything you need to bring Health Month to your school and give your students, faculty, admin, staff, and families something to cheer about!

As always, thanks for listening and happy teaching! 🙌