Educating with an Emphasis on Wellness
How do you aim to encourage a healthy and active lifestyle for all students in physical education classes?
Help students develop intrinsic motivation, enthusiasm and passion for being in your class!
- anonymous
As physical education teachers, we want to make sure our students leave the gym feeling positive, and wanting to come back to the next class. This means creating tasks in which all students can be successful, building confidence and a greater desire to participate and challenge oneself in the future.
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Another goal of physical education is to have students take responsibility of their own health and well being, and introduce them to a variety of activities so that every student can find a way of being active that they enjoy. If we can give students this knowledge and experience, we can set them up to active for life!
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As children get older, we see a decrease in physical activity (ParticipACTION, 2018), during this time it is very important to incorporate student voice and choice in physical education classes. At times this may mean offering an alternative activity or finding ways to incorporate student interests into existing activities to help increase engagement levels.
Challenges
What is standing in the way of getting engagement from all of our students?
WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?
There are many challenges to reaching EVERY student
varying level of ability
different interests
multicultural classrooms
Resources and References
Participaction Homepage
ParticipACTION has data and numerous Report Cards about Canadian Physical Activity Levels across all ages. They also have guidelines for activity levels for all ages.
This website is FULL of information and resources, but does take some time to go through it all. The youth report card of 2018 has some Physical Education specific notes that helped the findings above.
Ophea Healthy Schools, Healthy Communities - Teaching Resources
This page offers valuable teaching resources split into categories of Lesson Plans, Supplements, and Activities. These can be applied to your own phys ed classes to increase engagement.
Health and Physical Education Council (Hpec)
HPEC is a branch of the Alberta Teachers Associatio that is "committed to providing leadership in creating healthy, active school communities".
The HPEC resources site contains links to a lot of OTHER resources, and if you have time it is a great 'rabbit hole' to go down. Don't just stay on the resource page, but the entire website has great information!
Physical Education Curriculum
It is important to look at the Program of Studies, take particular note of the huge range of activities available including but not limited to team sports. The curriculum talks a lot about building an active lifestyle, let's incorporate that in our phys ed classes!