The Healthy Me Program
HEALTH EDUCATION THROUGH MUSIC AND MOVEMENT
The Healthy Me/Saludable Soy Program is a multi-sensory, fun-filled music and movement experience designed for young children. It focuses on health topics such as nutrition, the importance of drinking enough water, physical fitness, proper hygiene, and social-emotional skills. Each class is taught primarily through original songs and features puppet characters (Wawa the Otter, Coco the Crocodile, Manu the Turtle, and/or Aguacate the Avocado) who teach inspiring health lessons through interactive skits. Children have fun singing, dancing, and playing instruments during each lesson. The program was developed for both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking students and is most appropriate for preschool and TK-2 classes, but the music can be enjoyed by all.
The Healthy Me/Saludable Soy Program began in 2016 as a partnership between us, the YMCA of the East Bay’s Early Childhood Impact Program and its many Early Learning Centers (Head Start and Early Head Start) throughout San Francisco and the East Bay. Initially, the YMCA received funding from the Berkeley Soda Tax to implement health education at their Berkeley sites. They then contracted us to develop and teach a health program incorporating music and movement which is how the Healthy Me/Saludable Soy Program was created. Subsequently, the YMCA of the East Bay received funding from the City of Oakland Soda Tax, and the Public Health Institute, so we were able to expand the program to Richmond, Oakland, Rodeo, Winters, Woodland, Cortland, Pittsburg, and Antioch. Independently, the City of Albany has funded the program since 2017 for their preschool-kindergarten classrooms. Since the summer of 2020 (the start of the Covid-19 pandemic) the YMCA of the East Bay has been contracting us to teach a weekly live Zoom class for all of their sites. We regularly have 300-450 teachers and students tuning in from their own classrooms to sing, dance, and learn healthy habits on Zoom simultaneously.
The large majority of the centers where the Healthy Me/Saludable Soy Program is taught serve populations that are facing major systemic, social, and economic hardships and injustices. The YMCA of the East Bay, for instance, serves approximately 1,200 low-income children, ages 0 to 5, throughout four counties in Northern California (Alameda, Contra Costa, Yolo, and Sacramento). The majority of the children are Latine and/or African-American and all students are eligible for the subsidized, California Department of Education-funded, early learning programs and/or Early/Head Start.