Lesson Four of the DARE Program is about alcohol. The objectives of the lesson are:

• Students will be able to identify at least five harmful effects of alcohol on the body and the brain.
• Using the DARE Decision Making Model to address the stengths, needs and health benefits of NOT using alcohol
• Compare and contrast common beliefs about alcohol use
• Recognize personal misconceptions about alcohol
• Compare their estimates of the extent of drug use among adolescents with estimates reported in National Surveys

As always, the D.A.R.E. class starts with selected questions from the DARE Box followed up with a review of the past week's lesson.

An activity that we do in lesson four is ask the students, in their own minds, without talking to their partner yet, how many students in grade eight out of 100 do they think have drank alcohol?

They then talk to their partner and come up with pair's guess. In my experience the students nine times out of ten will overestimate and assume most middle school students have drank. When I give them the actual numbers from a National Survey, they are quite surprised. I facilitate a discussion as to why they overestimated and why they thought that. The lesson learned being the phrase that everyone is doing it, is inaccurate!

Our next activity is a true or false worksheet that students work on in pairs using information provided on the alcohol fact sheet. We then review the work sheet together. Following that we put to practice our DARE Decision Making Model and provide the students with scenarios asking them, as a team, to work on identifying the problem, the choices, how they would respond and then evaluating that response.

We wrap up the lesson with a review of what we learned and identifying which organs of the body are affected by alcohol . The students then review and reflect on what they learned, entering their responses into their journal.

(Lesson Five)