Part of the SNAP-Ed Strategies & Interventions Toolkit*
Turtle Island Tales is a place to find wellness and healing for you, your family, and your community. It is based on two multi-site scientific studies of home-based materials promoting family wellness for American Indian families with young children. It is also based on the seven grandfather teachings and the wisdom of our many grandmother advisers. Each section contains different information. There are recipes and games that are fun and healthy to use anytime. We are developing home-based kits to help children get excited about the journey with things such as stickers, coloring and story books, trading cards, and small puppets, and short films for kids. This will include 12 separate wellness lessons for a year-long wellness journey and seven grandfather teachings that instill lifelong concepts for healthy spirits.
Healthy Children Strong Families, which informed Turtle Island Tales, was designed by multiple American Indian communities in partnership with academic researchers to promote family wellness. The program is based on the Native concept of elders teaching younger generations and is guided by Social Cognitive Theory and Family Systems Theory. The program addresses individual and interpersonal factors influencing diet, physical activity, sleep, screen time, and emotional regulation. Randomized controlled trial results revealed promising healthy behavior changes, improved readiness to change health behaviors, and high community acceptance. Significant improvements in adult and child healthy diet patterns, adult fruit/vegetable intake, adult moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, the home nutrition environment, and adult self-efficacy for health behavior change were observed. There was a trend toward reduced screen time in children (p=.06). Adult participants increased their fruit and vegetable consumption from an average of 16.2 to 18.5 servings per week and increased their moderate-to-vigorous physical activity from 3.6 to 4.9, 15-minute bouts per week from pre- to post- intervention, respectively. Adult readiness-to-change scores increased for increasing physical activity, fruit and vegetable intake, and obtaining adequate sleep and for decreasing screen time. When assessing the home environment, scores in the nutrition domain increased post-intervention. These pre-post changes were all significantly greater (p<.05) than those observed in the control group of the clinical trial. Focus group findings showed great acceptance of the program with increased child-parent time spent together in program activities such as reading, physical activity, and cooking.
*SNAP-Ed Strategies & Interventions: An Obesity Prevention Toolkit for States is a compilation of interventions. The toolkit was developed by USDA's Food and Nutrition Service, The Association of SNAP-Ed Nutrition Education Administrators (ASNNA), the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Training and Research Translation (Center TRT), and the National Collaborative on Childhood Obesity Research (NCCOR), a partnership between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes for Health (NIH), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the USDA. It is designated and updated to help state SNAP-Ed administrative and implementing agencies identify evidence-based obesity prevention programs and policy, systems, and environmental (PSE) strategies and interventions to include in their SNAP-Ed plans.