Partnering for PA in Early Childhood: Sustainability via Active Garden Education
Rebecca Lee, PhD
Gabriel Shaibi, PhD
NIH/National Institute on Minority Health and Healthy Disparities 1U01MD010667-01
Sustainability via Active Garden Education (SAGE) is a garden based physical activity and nutrition intervention for preschool-aged children. The SAGE curriculum uses a school garden as a metaphor for child development and engages children in interactive games, songs, and learning activities. The SAGE curriculum focuses on improving physical activity, sedentary behaviors, fruit, and vegetable consumption, reducing eating in the absence of hunger, and also encourages healthy behavior changes and parenting practices in parents. The SAGE study incorporates community-based participatory research strategies into an ecologic approach to investigate factors needed to initiate and maintain PA and healthy dietary habits in the preschool setting while exploring the potential for sustainability for broad scale implementation and informing policy enactment and enforcement.