Keeping A Physical Education Active And Alive

Keeping a physical education department active and alive

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Achieving academic success and building a child’s foundation is one of the most important missions in an elementary school environment. Taking the raw tools and talents each student has and molding those skills into a student is a very challenging task, but one every teacher happily sets in front of themselves every school year. Every subject is like an ingredient that comprises the final product вЂ" a successful student вЂ" and without having physical education each of the 350 students in the given scenario will be short of what they need to be successful.

Every principal wants to have high test scores and for their students to become successful and this requires adequate scores on standardized test. Earning high test scores allows federal funding to continue and even increase in some scenarios.

Battling to keep your physical education program , the first tactic in approaching your principal is to show him or her that active students are more capable of keeping high grades and high test scores.

Another school system that faced a similar scenario with the district making cuts to departments occurred at Naperville Central High School (http://www.ncusd203.org/central/) in Illinois. Needing to raise test scores, the school chose to cut instruction in their physical education department to increase test scores in other academic areas such as math, science and language arts.

After comparing the test scores, results show that test scores dropped the year that the school cut time in the physical education department by XX percent. The local television station in the northeastern Illinois community, approximately one hour west of Chicago, did an in depth newscast showing the findings of the study (http://www.ncusd203.org/central/html/what/physed/learningreadiness.htm).

The method used to support that active kids get higher test scores was done by using two groups вЂ" both convenient samples вЂ" from within Naperville Central High School. One group was allotted time for instructional physical education and the other group was not allotted time in their day for instructional physical education. The instructor that was able to provide physical education integrated different comprehensive skills using Active Based Learning (www.actionbasedlearning.com) to stimulate positive brain activity for his students.

For example, at an elementary level, during stretches you might have students count in Spanish out loud to help with their Spanish class. Another potential example would be to give some of your activities an Olympic theme if the students were studying ancient Greek games in social studies. These are just two examples,