Proper way to checkout a tag?

Hi. We tag our releases with names like "release-0", "release-1" and
so forth. Tags (lightweight ones) seem like the perfect markers for
these releases since we want a reference that can't ever change (as
opposed to a head).

The problem is that since there's no head pointing to each release, if
our users just:

$ git checkout release-1

When they want to build that release, they get into a detached HEAD
state. I've always construed detached HEAD as a non-standard state,
and it doesn't seem proper to reach it regularly in the course of a
standard operation like checking out past releases.

It's particularly confusing for our users who are new to Git.

Any thoughts, or alternative methods to do this?

Thanks, D