Health Risk Factors

Download Health Risk Factors Lesson

Here is very important lesson for your students. It presents the importance of health risk factors. This lesson made one of my students exercising right in the classroom. It makes the students aware and conscious about the factors that influence their health. Ok - here it goes.

I start off with basic health terms.

Risk factors - are behaviors that represent harm to health.

Values - are beliefs of conduct that you find important.

Abstinence - is voluntarily choosing not to do something.

After careful explanation of each term, I go to the next page of the presentation and do matching exercise with the terms reviewed.

Next, I present basic health risk factor for our teenagers:

• Careless behaviors
• Tobacco use
• Alcohol and other drugs use
• Sexual behaviors
• Unhealthy eating behaviors
• Physical inactivity

Now, I will go to the next page of the presentation and change the risk factors into the helpful factors. For example, the use of tobacco is the risk factor. The helpful factor of tobacco use will be tobacco free. Seeing the presentation will make more sense.

Warning! Next exercise is very effective.

Tell your students to pick the number of years they want to live.

Present risk factor on the page 5 of the presentation.

Have your students look at risk factors and list any of them that they may be engaging. Make each student add up the numbers of years for applied behaviors and subtract from the total number of years in ones life.

This number that one student will get could be premature age of death.

Here is the example of this exercise:

I want to live 100 years.

Lets say that smoking (-8 years), stress (-7 years), and overeating (-5 years) are all the factors that apply to me. I will add these three health risk factors that apply to me together. It adds up to 20 years.

Now, I will take the number of years I want to live, which is 100 and subtract 20. Eighty years is my premature age of death.

Reminder! All numbers are hypothetical.

Lets continue down to page 7 of the presentation. Here you will find the simple exercise about helpful and risk factors. Just have your students classify them either one at the time or all at one. It’s up to you.

Explain about protective factors. It says that if protective factors are present in teen's life - the amount of risk taking behaviors decreases, and the chances for growing up healthy, caring, and responsible adult increases.

Last but not least, I will present role models and values and have a discussion.

Positive role models - are peers that a young person looks up to.

Positive values - are honesty, integrity, courage, loyalty, and hard work.

I think you will have fun. This lesson works!

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