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Growing Healthy Kids

Growing Healthy Kids is a garden-themed nutrition-education curriculum developed at Oregon State University. The curriculum is best aligned to Common Core Standards for students in 2nd and 3rd grades.  Read more about GHK, including its evidence base and other aspects of its development, by clicking the green button below. You’ll also find the full curriculum there. Teaching GHK to fidelity (exactly how it was written), including by involving students in gardening and taste testing, is essential for achieving the program’s objectives of increasing the number of vegetables and fruits students eat and broadening the range of garden vegetables they enjoy.

In 2020, with many children learning from home, Oregon State University created a GHK Virtual Toolkit (below) for elementary school teachers in distance or hybrid learning settings and for parents and other caregivers teaching elementary school-age children at home. The Virtual Toolkit brings pieces of the full GHK Curriculum alive digitally, including by providing an engaging interactive tour of each lesson. It also includes new resources targeted to virtual learners. For those teaching the full GHK curriculum in person, the GHK Virtual Toolkit can enhance the learning experience.   For the most impact when using the GHK Virtual Toolkit, aim to add hands-on growing and taste-testing experiences; tools for providing these experiences are available at the buttons below.  More information is available in this news story: https://beav.es/J9e.

GHK was peer reviewed and accepted into the SNAP-Ed Toolkit as a practice tested obesity prevention intervention: https://snapedtoolkit.org/interventions/programs/growing-healthy-kids-g….   

Full GHK Curriculum

GHK Virtual Toolkit (below)

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