During both school closure periods a huge emphasis has been put on keeping children’s minds and bodies healthy. There has been such amazing content available and most of it for free. It also became abundantly clear that active breaks from ‘learning’ is a necessity!
So, how many of these healthy habits will we continue to use once we are all back to school?
Below are my top lessons and thoughts:
5 – 10 minute active breaks from learning works.
Activities like the daily mile are brilliant ways to encourage exercise in a non-skill based way; get outside for a 10 minutes run, walk, skip, dribble a football, it doesn’t matter. And this philosophy has worked so well during lockdown as a way to just get children away from the computer screen for short blocks of time. (If we were smart we may have been able to sneak a few skills into these activities without the children realising...)
Taking a 10 minute active break is proven to give our brains a cognitive kick, so hopefully we can remember that when we are back in the classroom telling the children “you will miss your break of you don’t finish that maths work…” Maybe a break is exactly what they need!
Not all physical activity needs to be skill based.
Without the ability to play team games the focus for PE has been; Get Active. The most important job for any PE teacher is to create a love of being active, not to build the next Mo Farah or Laura Trott. (However it would be nice)
Virtual PE lessons and Joe Wicks sessions promote personal bests, they show that activity is fun and for lots of children they remove the anxiety about being active in front of others, especially as they get older.
This can never replace PE, and many children need team sports or competition (growing up I struggled in school but hockey is where I exceled, so I needed this) but is there going to be a place for a different style of PE that can help to spread that love of being active to more children?
Streaming an Active Morning Challenge will get 100’s of children active at once.
Every day during lockdown I was able to get nearly 200 children active for 15 minutes in less than 35 minutes of my time. This isn’t really possible in the real world, so is there an argument to keep this ‘Active Morning Challenge’ going once we are back in the classroom?
10 minutes of FUN high intensity movement to wake everyone up each morning. Google Classroom isn’t going anywhere so there is no reason why as a PE teacher you can’t continue to run live sessions like this for the whole school at one time. If your recording these you will have an endless library of sessions to come back to as well.
Children can be inspired to be active by their teachers being active.
I think sometimes teachers don’t realise the impact they truly have on their children when it comes to influencing how they spend their time. If you love to read, and you engage with your class about reading, your class will learn to love to read. The same with music, sport, art….
So by just showing an interest in being active; getting involved in lessons, wearing your PE kit or taking part in a live workout session you are demonstrating to your class the importance and enjoyment of being active.
It’s just as important for teachers to get outside at lunch time as it is for the children.
Checking my Strava account after lunch it’s filled with teachers getting outside for a quick run or walk. Now how often does that happen when you’re at school? I’m going to guess never.
In school your movements are limited to walking around classroom for 90% of your time, just making the same small routes between tables. At home you could easily sit behind your lap top all day only getting up to grab that next snack unless you made an active effort to get out!
So when you do get back to school try and remember how you felt after that short burst of fresh air, continue to prioritise getting outside for a quick walk at lunch time, give yourself that active break and raise your heart rate slightly (even if it is just to the coffee house).
That was a selection of my top lessons/thoughts or hopes for activity after lockdown, and I hope these habits and the importance of keeping children (and staffs) brains and bodies active throughout the day, not just in PE will continue.
I would love to hear how virtual activity has been for your school during lockdown and if you think you will make any changes to keeping children active once you’re back in school!
Schools' Active Community Coach 