TOS Crew Review: Growing Healthy Homes

Recently, I had the chance to review (and keep the pdf version of) Nutrition 101: Choose Life! from Growing Healthy Homes. Nutrition 101: Choose Life is a program which uses healthy eating as a context for studying the human body and its systems while looking at how the food we eat affects our physiology.

There are 12 main body systems covered in six units:

• Unit 1- The Brain and Nervous System
• Unit 2- The Digestive System
• Unit 3- The Respiratory, Olfactory, Auditory, and Visual Systems
• Unit 4- The Muscular and Skeletal Systems
• Unit 5- The Cardiovascular and Immune Systems
• Unit 6- The Endocrine System and Emotions

The program was written by four mothers and is designed for positive, effective, long-term, healthy life style changes to combat the epidemic of disease in our nation.

It's a creative approach to educating our children on why we choose to eat the way we do. Even if you are already modeling healthy eating with your kids, this curriculum can help them understand and explain why they are making those choices.

In addition to information about each human system and how food affects each one, there are recipes to try out that go along with the principle being discussed.

This is a very thorough program and one that makes a great choice for health and biology education all at once.

Cost:

• CD- ROM for $79.95
• the book for $99.95
• purchase both the book and the CD for $129.95

I think it's a unique program and it has plenty of information included for reaching their target goal. Being unit study oriented, I would not choose to use it as a chronological program. Instead, I would use the units I need when the topic pops up in our studies.

I think this is a great program for teaching kids about proper food choices while studying human body systems at the same time. It is not one that I would choose to purchase for our homeschool because I'm a certified biology teacher! So, you might take this part of my opinion with a grain of salt (and I share it in the interest of being honest with my readers about whether or not I'd buy it and why). I'd be hard pressed to justify the purchase of an $80 to $100 program that teaches basic human systems and nutrition when I taught human systems to 7th graders for five years plus! For the record, I don't envision ever really purchasing a packaged science program. With an undergraduate degree in biological sciences and a graduate degree in curriculum and instruction secondary education, I am well trained for writing science curriculum and well...that's what I do! With a chemical engineer for a husband I've got an easy consultant for chemistry, physics, and math as well. Everyone has a niche and this one is mine.

All that aside, I think this curriculum does a terrific job of addressing healthy eating which is so important for overall health. We do our children a disservice when we don't model appropriate food choices and provide our families with healthy food. If this is something that needs to be addressed in your family, I would highly recommend this curriculum.