Asthma Education: An Integrated Approach. Ideas for Elementary Classrooms.

This manual contains lesson plans for teaching all children how to monitor their own health and for teaching children with asthma how to play a role in the management of their condition. Each lesson plan is compatible with existing traditional elementary curricula for math, science, health, or language arts. After an introduction that discusses the incidence of childhood asthma and provides questions and answers about the asthma teaching unit, the next section contains some basic background information about asthma, including its symptoms, triggers, and treatments. Information about using the peak flow meter (a small, hand-held tube that measures the ability of the lungs to exhale air) as an asthma teaching tool is provided. The next section contains introductory math, language arts, and science lesson plans. All of the lesson plans contain activities to engage students and include enhancement ideas to expand the lessons. Many of the lessons provide accompanying camera-ready worksheets found in the next section. The last section contains organizations that can be contacted for more information about asthma, as well as listings of: books, guides, curriculum and videos for teachers; books for children; and videos for children. (CR)