Course Description for Health Education Courses

Title: Health Education

Important: This Is Not a Single Course

This project is not a single linear course written for one age group. It is a collection of health education teaching resources spanning Minnesota's proposed K-12 Health Academic Standards (2025, Commissioner Approved — see references.md and the harvest log at logs/harvest-mn-health-standards.md in the project root), organized into 8 parallel grade bands:

• Kindergarten
• Grade 1
• Grade 2
• Grade 3
• Grade 4
• Grade 5
• Grades 6-8
• Grades 9-12

Every one of the 6 content strands below runs through all 8 bands. Each band gets its own section of the site, and each section carries the full set of resource types — chapter content, quizzes, MicroSims, infographics, and references — written and calibrated for that band. A grade-3 learner and a grades-9-12 learner studying the same strand (e.g., Personal Safety and Violence Prevention) get different pages, different reading level, different MicroSim complexity, and different quiz difficulty, not the same page with a different reading age applied on the fly.

Reading level scales with band. Content generators (chapter-content- generator, quiz-generator, microsim-generator, etc.) must target band-appropriate reading level and cognitive complexity:

Band	Approx. reading level	Cognitive demand (per MDE anchor standards)
K	Pre-reader / read-aloud	Identify, recognize, name
1-2	Early elementary	Identify, describe, recall with simple support
3-5	Elementary	Explain, identify, connect to personal experience
6-8	Middle school	Analyze, evaluate influences, apply in scenarios
9-12	High school	Design, evaluate, synthesize, apply across contexts

Audience

K-12 classroom teachers, curriculum coordinators, and students, each accessing the section that matches their grade band. Also health-standards compliance staff cross-checking site content against MDE's proposed benchmarks.

Prerequisites

None assumed for the Kindergarten band. Each subsequent band assumes mastery of the benchmarks in the band(s) before it, per that strand's own progression — e.g., grade 3 Food and Nutrition benchmarks assume grade 1-2 Food and Nutrition benchmarks were covered. Prerequisite edges in the learning graph should generally flow band-to-band within the same strand, not across strands.

Topics

The 6 strands from the MDE proposed standards are the primary topic axis; each spans some or all of the 8 grade bands noted:

1. Food and Nutrition (K-12)
2. Human Growth and Development (K-5), continuing as Human Growth and Development and Sexual Health (6-12)
3. Mental and Emotional Health (K-12)
4. Personal Health and Wellness (K-12)
5. Personal Safety and Violence Prevention (K-12)
6. Substance Use Awareness and Prevention (6-12 only — not taught below grade 6)

Cutting across all 6 strands, the standards also define 8 anchor standards that describe the skill/knowledge type of a given benchmark (functional health knowledge, analyzing influences, accessing valid information, interpersonal communication, decision-making, goal setting, healthy practices/behaviors, promoting health/safety/wellbeing of self and others). The learning-graph-generator should treat strand × band as the concept-grouping axis and anchor standard as a tag/category on each concept, not a separate topic.

Learning Outcomes

Because outcomes scale by band, these are expressed as the progression across bands rather than a single end-state. By the end of grades 9-12, a student who has moved through all 8 bands in a strand will be able to:

• Remember: Recall core health vocabulary and facts introduced starting in Kindergarten (e.g., food groups, emotion names, safety rules).
• Understand: Explain why a health practice, behavior, or resource matters, in age-appropriate terms that grow more nuanced band over band.
• Apply: Use functional health knowledge and skills (communication, decision-making, goal setting) in realistic personal and social scenarios.
• Analyze: Evaluate influences on health behavior — media, peers, culture, advertising — with sophistication that increases from simple recognition (elementary) to critical evaluation (middle/high school).
• Evaluate: Assess the reliability of health information, products, and services, and judge trade-offs in personal health decisions.
• Create: Design a personal health plan, advocacy action, or peer-support strategy appropriate to the student's own life circumstances (grades 9-12 capstone-level outcome).

Content generators should produce band-scoped versions of these outcomes per section rather than assuming every learner reaches the grades 9-12 outcome.