Classroom resources for engaging children
The primary school resources are developed with and for 10 to 12 year old school children and their teachers. Like all our resources, they are free to use. They were evaluated in a large randomised trial with over 10 000 students, and shown to have a large, positive effect on learning outcomes. Project partners have translated them into Spanish, Kiswahili, Kinyarwanda, Norwegian, French, Italian, Greek, Croatian, Basque, Persian, Brazilian-Portuguese. We welcome new translation partners.
The Health Choices Book
Richly illustrated textbook for primary school children aged 10 to 12, including a comic-book story about 12 Key Concepts, instructions for classroom activities, exercises, key messages, and glossary.
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The Health Choices Book: video
The nine Health Choices Book lessons, narrated, animated, and with closed-captions.
Go to YouTube playlistTeachers’ Guide
This guide includes lesson plans and other resources to help teachers using The Health Choices Book.
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Activity cards
These cards are for use in Lesson 7 of the The Health Choices Book. The activity is created to demonstrate how comparisons with few people can be misleading.
Download the Cards
Checklist poster
This poster with the key messages from The Health Choices Book is a checklist for applying the 12 Key Concepts and a reminder of the most important messages in the book.
Get the Poster
Anyone can use these resources for free. All IHC resources are also free to adapt for non-commercial use under the following Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
Contact us if you want to produce a translation.
We evaluated the effects of these resources in Uganda, where we randomly allocated half of 120 schools (over 10,000 year-five students). Teachers taught the lessons over a period of nine weeks, with one double lesson (80 minutes) per week during a single term. We compared the ability of the children in those schools to apply 12 of the Key Concepts to the ability of the children in the other schools, and found a large positive effect.
In a follow-up study, we found that this effect was sustained after one year.
We developed the resources between 2013 and 2015, using a human-centred design approach with several cycles of prototyping, pilot testing and feedback from children, teachers and other stakeholders in Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda and Norway.
In a structured process, we identified which Key Concepts were likely relevant and teachable to primary school students. See: Prioritization of concepts for primary school.
The following 12 Key Concepts formed the basis of IHC resources for primary schools (10-12 year olds):
Concepts about claims:
- Messages that ignore harms
- Trust in personal experiences
- Belief that commonly-used means effective
- Belief that new is better
- Trust in expert opinions
- Trust that there are no competing interests
- Messages with no comparison
- Belief in single studies
Concepts about evidence:
- Similar comparison groups
- Participants unaware of health action
- Small studies
Concepts about choices:
- Benefits and harms