Dear Teachers, Community Leaders and Parents/Caregivers:
Welcome to KickinNutrition.TV (KNTV)! Thank you for making the choice to use our Health/Nutrition Education and Wellness curriculum designed to educate, engage and empower youth to adopt healthy habits. KNTV’s comprehensive, interactive curriculum is designed for students and teachers in grades 4-8. KNTV is aligned with the National Health and Education Standards (NHES) and Core Curriculum standards. KNTV uses multimedia technology to provide students with the skills, motivation, knowledge and shared experiences to overcome obstacles to eating nutritious and healthy food and to leading physically active lifestyles.
I became very interested in children’s nutrition after my son was diagnosed with epilepsy at age three and doctors talked with me about how nutrition plays a critical role in long-term health and performance. Today my son is a healthy 17 year-old avid basketball player, and for this, I am very grateful. The journey prompted me to collaborate with my former Sesame Street colleagues and talented artists to produce America’s first-ever TV & Web series on healthy eating, cooking and wellness for young tweens and teens.
KickinNutrition.TV offers a curriculum containing six high-quality video lessons of approximately 35 minutes in length, featuring REYNA, an African-American and Latina teen who stars in her own on-line comedy and cooking show with her best friends, an Interactive Website, a 3D adventure game, a Community Kitchen for sharing classroom content, including healthy recipes, Fitness instruction by an NBA Celtics player and time for a “Class Chat” (in-class discussion). Each lesson ends with a hands-on, small group in-class activity led by the teachers where students are challenged to apply the knowledge and skills they just learned in the lesson and share their creativity with classmates.
We understand that there are many barriers to teaching nutrition. However, never before, has the need for child health and nutrition education been so great. And the explosion in children’s use of technology has created exciting opportunities use technology to teach nutrition education. Our research has shown that these digital learning experiences more powerfully engage digital-age students and more effectively teach important behavioral skills, compared to traditional educational strategies and materials.
We strongly believe in the model of peer education, and have fully integrated this approach into our program. Since 2005, our company and our non-profit organization have been providing high quality, programming for TV broadcast, the web and to schools. KickinNutrition.TV is the brainchild of award-winning former Sesame Street executive producers, working in close collaboration with nutrition and education experts, including, Dr. Paula Quatromoni, DSC, RD of Boston University and advisors from Harvard School of Public Health: Dr. Walter Willett, Dr. Eric Rimm, Dr. Juliana Cohen and Dr. Scott Osterweil of MIT. The curriculum is based on the advice of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
By collaborating with communities all across America who have embraced our entertaining characters, and nutrition instruction, we have been able to change people’s lives. Through this journey, we have learned the importance of conscious decision-making in health promotion for the body and mind.
Thank you for sharing our mission to educate and empower youth to become healthy and active citizens in the world!
With Best Wishes,
Natasha Lance Rogoff
Executive Producer