Lessons Learned


On this page, you will find lesson summaries and adaptations that compliment the HealthMatters curriculum

HealthMatters Lessons

The Exercise and Nutrition Health Education Curriculum for People with Developmental Disabilities has well outlined lesson plans that are easy to follow when leading your health promotion programming. It is also important to remember that there are a lot of factors that make each individual and each programming location unique and finding ways to utilize available resources and adapting the lessons to fit those unique needs is vital to success. You can follow the lesson plan exactly or find that your participants are really excited about one particular component and you end up making the lesson more so your own as you go. Keep in mind that being healthy is a choice and we all have different motivating factors and barriers to making those healthy choices and a one size fits all isn’t the best approach. As individuals we each have our own preferences which need to be respected and as many as possible options explored so that each participant can find the best fit for them when it comes to how they chose to be healthy. It is also important as a lesson leader that you don’t allow the things that you like/dislike to guide the lesson discussion and activities.

Lesson 30: Rewarding Myself
In addition to the lesson outline we also discussed how it would be helpful to use the sentence, “ If ...
For this lesson, I made a copy of the vignette situations and cut them into strips so that as the ...
Lesson 21: Nutrients We Need
This lesson covered quite a bit of in depth material and prompted quite a bit of discussion. The participants did ...
In addition to the breathing techniques covered in the book we also added a few. Imagine that there is a ...
Lesson 15: What Foods Do I Like to Eat?
The most common theme throughout our group’s participant goals focused on trying new foods and trying to like healthy foods ...
Lesson 14: Am I Drinking Enough Water?
During the discussions guided by the textbook, participants also asked questions about quality of tap water when there is a ...
Lesson 13: What Are Good and Bad Influences?
When I asked our group of participants if they knew what the word influence meant, the response was no. So ...
Lesson 11: What is My Blood Pressure?
I was able to borrow two blood pressure cuffs, one from the university health and wellness department and another from ...
Lesson 10: What is My Heart Rate?
I was lucky enough to have a stethoscope available so we started with each participant listening to their own heartbeat ...
Lesson 8: Healthy Choices/ Self-Advocacy
We talked about what it means to make healthy choices; like eating the right foods, being active, and knowing what ...