Imagine:
You are in the kitchen and your 4-year-old runs in yelling “Mom! Mom!” You look down and say “What is it?” They put your hand on their sternum and become still. After a second they whisper with delight “Can you feel it?”
Immediately you realize your little genius has discovered their heart beating.
You explain what the heart does in the 20 seconds you have before that marvelous tiny human runs off again to discover something else. This is exactly what happened between our founder Nancy Howes and her daughter that sparked her passion for promoting health literacy and challenging the education systems priorities and hierarchy of standard curriculum subjects in children’s education.
Now you may be wondering: “What is health literacy?”
As defined by the CDC, personal health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others.
Health Literacy is a basic understanding of how your body functions, the fuel that helps it thrive, and the signals your body gives you to communicate the state of your physical and mental well being. Being Health Literate is having the power to act on this information.
Why is it important?
Public Health no longer provides a personalized approach to wellness. The health care system reacts to a problem with a generalized and quick fix solution, an immediate diagnosis. The idea that the science of natural healing be investigated is a luxury of time that our current system can not accommodate. Individuals can and must understand more than they have in the past and be able to embrace healthier foods, lifestyle, and practices.
How to promote health literacy in your children’s education:
Introducing this science early in life, in bite size chunks, guarantees comprehension and curiosity.Bill Nye the Science Guy said there is significant evidence that supports introducing a child under 10 years old to science concepts creates a curiosity around these topics. Children are naturally curious, and that curiosity extends to the hows and whats of their own body and mind.
For 10 years,Know Yourself has inspired students ages 7 and older to build a foundation of personal health literacy that helps them excel in all they do.
Our engaging and interactive series began with a curious child asking her parents how her body worked. Our co-founders couldn’t find materials to answer their daughter’s questions so they created Know Yourself for parents everywhere to teach their children that learning anatomy is fun and easy.
Know Yourself. It makes you better at everything.
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