• Body Image
• Gender Identity
• Growth and Change
• Hurdles to Relationships
• Improving Your Communication
• Relationships
• The Body’s Processes
• Who Am I?

Plus 1 teaching guide:

• Growth and Development Teaching Guide

Health and Understanding is a literacy-based series and interactive whiteboard programme that helps teachers with these health issues during the last three years of primary school. The series provides teachers and students with the opportunity to explore a range of health topics that are involved in, and required for, a healthy lifestyle.

Written by experienced children’s authors including Hazel Edwards, Goldie Alexander, Alan Horsfield and Wendy St Germain, Health and Understanding is endorsed by the Centre for Hormone Research, a joint department of the Royal Children’s Hospital and Murdoch Childrens Research Institute.

Who tells you how you should look? Who says you must be thin to be fashionable? Who says men must be all muscles! You are who you are. Thinking less about how you look and becoming more involved with friends, sports and activities, will keep you fit and stimulate your mind.

Your gender – whether you identify yourself as a boy or a girl – is one of the most basic things that goes towards making you who you are. Depending on your family, your culture and your society, your gender might have a big influence on how you behave and how other people treat you.

Gender Identity explores issues from why parents buy different types of toys for boys and girls, to how the media represents gender.

You spend your first 16 to 18 years growing and developing. But it doesn’t stop there. Your body continues to change throughout your life.

Growth and Change looks at some of the physical changes that take place at different life stages – from birth, through childhood and puberty, to maturity and old age. It also explores how these might affect you emotionally and ways you can cope with the changes as you grow.

Friends and family can make our lives lots of fun. However, healthy and happy relationships don’t just happen. Getting along with people (whether family, friends or classmates) can make you feel like you are running an obstacle course. Problems can get in the way, or sometimes you just don’t know how to make friends.

Everyone faces these hurdles and copes with them in their own way. But most importantly, you need to get over them and continue the race!

Every day, you spend a lot of your time communicating. Your words, expressions and body language all send messages that other people interpret. Learning how to communicate starts very early in life and continues throughout your life. Not everyone finds communicating easy, but you can learn to improve your skills.

Improving Your Communication explores the communication process, and how to send clear messages. Improving your communication skills will make it easier for you to talk with other people, learn more and form stonger friendships.

It is natural to want to feel cared for, and to care for others. We care for our families, our friends, even our pets! But what is a good relationship?

A good relationship is one where you feel safe and supported; where you enjoy the things you have in common and respect the differences. It may last a lifetime. It can get you through bad times as well as good. But not all relationship are positive. You need to recognise and act when peer pressure influences you to act in ways that make you feel uncomfortable.

Relationships explores some common types of relationships and how to make them stronger.

Your body is an amazing machine which grows, learns and adapts over time. Hard bones allow you to stand tall, while joints give you the flexibility to move. Muscles move you quickly or slowly and in different directions. You eat food and process it into energy while breathing in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide. Your heart pumps blood around you body.

All this happens and you don’t even have to think about it. It is controlled by your brain.

You are special. You are one of a kind. There is no-one in the world like you. You have unique DNA, unique fingerprints and the iris of your eyes is like no-one else’s. You have physical and emotional strengths and weaknesses and have grown up in an environment no-one else can copy.

The combination of these natural and environmental influences makes you unique. Don’t let the media or other people tell you who you should be like or how you should look and act. Be yourself. You’re unique.

The Growth and Development Teaching Guide provides the busy classroom teacher with additional information focusing on:

• overviews of subject matter
• topics for discussion in personal development
• ideas for research
• ideas for creative activities
• literacy skills, reproducible work sheets

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