CATCH Curriculum

Developed over the last 25 years, the CATCH curriculum has been designed to help you teach kids how to live a health lifestyle by eating healthy and being active

There are several program curriculums to choose from with CATCH. Whether you are a school, after-school or pre-school organization, CATCH has a curriculum that works for you.

Choose a Program
• CATCH for Schools (K-5)
• CATCH for Schools (6-8)
• CATCH After-School (CKC)
• CATCH Early Childhood

School Curriculum

The CATCH Curriculum was designed using the social learning theory

The CATCH Curriculum is a classroom and after-school health education curriculum that teaches children to identify, practice and adopt healthy eating and physical activity habits. The Go For Health Series series for schools, Life in the Balance for middle schools, CKC Nutrition Guide and It's Fun to be Healthy for early childhood have years of research on their effectiveness in the classroom.

Each series encourages changes in behavior that supports healthful eating and physical activity patterns—primary risk factors of heart disease, osteoporosis, high blood pressure and obesity. Children learn the facts about healthy living and live the principles of health every day.

After-School
Curriculum

Your after-school organization now has two nutrition guidebooks to choose from, K-5 and 5-8

The CATCH Kids Club Manuals feature lessons organized into themes related to physical activity, nutrition, and screen-time reduction. A variety of teaching strategies are used including: movement, activities, individual practice, educational games, goal setting, and hands-on snack preparation.

The curriculum uses a variety of education strategies, including large group discussions, educational games and activities,goal setting, and hands-on snack preparation and taste-testing. Each session contains detailed descriptions of the procedure for presenting each activity, with direct questions and/or statements to students enclosed in boxes within the session descriptions.

Each nutrition guide comes with a Resource CD-ROM with teaching materials and handouts for easy duplication and classroom distribution.

Hearty Heart...a history

Hearty Heart and Friends turn 30!

Hearty Heart and Friends came into existence in 1982 as part of the Minnesota Heart Health Program. Based on success in preventing smoking, it was decided to create a cardiovascular health program for children guided by behavioral principles.

The first pilot was conducted on grades 3 and 4 because the researchers knew they could conduct a reliable survey. They wanted a strong, attractive role model for this group but elementary school students were too young. It was decided that healthy, bigger-than-life cartoon characters – Hearty Heart, Dynamite Diet, Salt Sleuth and Flash Fitness – from the Intergalactic School of Heart Health would work best.

The team felt the characters needed to be part of a story, a mission, to help other children, because that would instill how important it is to have a healthy diet and regular physical activity. Second, it was decided the actual messages needed to be very simple, because most of the choices involved “yes, no” decisions, like smoking.

The original Hearty Heart program divided foods into “Everyday and Sometimes” foods. Foods that were low in fat, salt and sugar, and high in fiber, were “Everyday” foods that kids were encouraged to eat most of the time. Third, we wanted the program to be interactive and active, and so the students prepared their own healthy snack foods during one class each week, with the recipes given to the students so they could also prepare them at home.

The basic outline of the program was developed by Cheryl Perry (who came up with the names of all the characters) and Helen Roemhild, the program coordinator. The team asked John Finnegan and Stacy Richardson to help put together a slide show for each class, and John's friends did the drawings and recordings in an old trailer. John Finnegan, the current Dean of the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota, did the narration, and Stacy did most of the female parts.

The curriculum was piloted in 10-week, 20-session programs in Mankato, Minnesota in Fall 1982, under Mary Smyth's direction. The team worked with Mary to train the teachers, but Mary did all the shopping for the ten food preparation days, and made sure the classes ran smoothly.

The results were published in the 1985 in the Journal of School Health. From those beginnings, the team then applied to NIH for additional funding, and the Hearty Heart Home Team was developed as a companion to the classroom program.