7th/8th Grade Alternative Family Life Curriculum Course

The 7th/8th grade curriculum empowers adolescents to make healthy decisions, build positive relationships, and navigate teenage changes with confidence by developing critical thinking skills around drugs, alcohol, vaping, media literacy, and healthy relationships. The curriculum addresses personal health through nutrition and hygiene while equipping students to recognize harassment and abuse, practice assertiveness and refusal skills, and understand that abuse is never the victim's fault. Students learn systematic media evaluation strategies, consent, and how to identify risk factors while accessing community resources including school counselors and specialized hotlines. By fostering self-awareness, boundary-setting, and upstander mentality, this curriculum prepares 7th/8th grade students to protect themselves and others while building a safe, respectful school and community culture.

Question 1: How do I make healthy decisions, build and maintain positive relationships, and navigate media messages while managing the physical and emotional changes of adolescence?

Question 2: How do I recognize and respond to harmful behaviors like vaping, harassment, and abuse, and what resources are available to help me stay safe?

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These comprehensive lessons develop adolescents' critical thinking skills and self-awareness as they navigate complex social and health decisions and problem-solving. They explore how drugs and alcohol impair the brain's decision-making abilities, learning about specific substances and their effects on judgment, inhibitions, and memory. The curriculum emphasizes that self-awareness, understanding one's character, feelings, and motivation is fundamental to making responsible decisions that align with personal values and protect health. 

Students then examine healthy versus toxic relationships, understanding that self-esteem and core values (dependability, reliability, loyalty, honesty, efficiency) influence relationship choices and quality. Students learn that media shapes views of healthy relationships, can cause increased anxiety and depression, and that they must view media with a critical lens. The curriculum then shifts to personal health and hygiene, and the importance of regular washing, use of deodorant/antiperspirant (as a personal choice reflecting values), and building relationships with trusted healthcare providers.

Students study nutrition using the Dietary Guidelines, reflecting on their own eating patterns and how nutrition affects energy, growth, and disease prevention. Finally, students develop conflict management skills through discussions about family relationships and reading articles on respectful disagreement, practicing how to resolve conflicts using core values like communication, trust, honesty, and integrity.

This critical portion equips students with skills to evaluate information, resist substance use, and recognize harmful behaviors. Students learn systematic strategies for vetting media sources: looking for trusted websites, examining URLs (checking for .edu, .gov, .org), being critical of content, questioning the author's credentials and objectivity, and comparing information across multiple sources, identifying what makes sources credible or unreliable. The lessons then address vaping and e-cigarettes through research-based learning. Students discover that 48% of teens in Pima County have tried a vape, and that e-cigarettes contain nicotine (highly addictive and harmful to the developing brain until age 26), ultrafine particles, cancer-causing chemicals, heavy metals (nickel, tin, lead), and flavoring chemicals linked to serious lung disease ("popcorn lung"). Students learn that nicotine affects dopamine (the "feel good" chemical) and disrupts attention and learning.

The final portion of this curriculum addresses harassment and abuse and that it can occur in schools, workplaces, homes, and extracurricular settings. They distinguish harassment from bullying, recognizing that harassment is unwelcome behavior while bullying involves repeated harmful behavior by someone with power. Students explore why victims don't speak out. The curriculum emphasizes that abuse is never the victim's fault and explores harmful effects: physical illness, withdrawal from activities, substance use, difficulty with relationships, academic decline, and mental health issues.

Students practice setting boundaries, identifying red flags (excessive flattery, unwarranted gifts), and learning assertiveness. They understand that professionals (teachers, counselors, doctors) are mandated reporters, and they have resources available: school counselors, 911 for emergencies, DCS Child Abuse Hotline (1-888-767-2445), and support organizations.

This final portion empowers students to protect themselves and others through understanding consent, practicing refusal skills, and becoming advocates. Students reflect on activities they do independently and consider risk factors that could complicate situations, being with unfamiliar adults, going to unfamiliar places, not telling them where they're going. Through activities, students demonstrate understanding of refusal skills in realistic scenarios, practicing confident ways to say "no" and leaving uncomfortable situations. The curriculum reinforces that consent is foundational to empowerment and safety.

Throughout the lesson, the curriculum emphasizes that speaking out is the first step to healing, that friends don't stay silent but become "upstanders," and that community resources such as school counselors, trusted adults, law enforcement, and specialized hotlines—are available to help. By the end of these lessons, students understand their rights, their power to set boundaries, the importance of seeking help, and their responsibility to advocate for a safe school and community culture.