What does health mean to you?

I taught this unit to my Year 5 students straight after participating in the connectedPE conference in Dubai. There was one workshop led by Andy Vasily, discussing the idea of using 'provocation' to hook our students and getting them to invest their lesson time by engaging in different activities.

With this in mind, I wanted to get my students to understand why this health unit is important to them. I opened up my class with a fact that "62% of Egyptians are overweight with 32% of those are obese (WHO)." After explaining some key words, we had an open discussion about what they thought about this and why this was happening? There is also a lot of information that is told to them by parents or communities that is wrong. It was time to correct them, so they can go back and correct these people with facts.

This followed with the question, 'What does health mean to you?' I expected answers focusing on fitness, calories, skinny, muscular etc, which nicely introduced my next video. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geX1V1Q1BHY) showed to them that health means different things to different people, such as clean water, food, shelter, happiness etc. It was important for the students to answer that each person had the right to their own definition, as health belongs to you only, but also noticing that your health could affect others in different ways. This then got the students thinking about their own answers previously and wanted to create new definitions of their own.

I carried on this conversation over Showbie (online platform for students) where I asked the students to ask their parents what health meant to them? After getting all this information, I asked them to write their own definition of what health meant to them and the answers were remarkable.

Once I finished the unit, I gave each student a piece of paper (speech bubble) to write their definition of health, which I stuck up on our PE notice board, so we could showcase this to the rest of the school. The rest of the unit focused on calories in from food and calories out from exercise, so they understood how simple choices/decisions play a major role in their lifestyle.

On another note, teaching 'health' as a separate unit has not sat with me well whilst I've been a PE teacher. Having spoke to a few practitioners, it is quite clear that I am not the only one concerned. Some schools have adopted teaching health throughout the year, rather than a specific unit. This is what I have been thinking about for a while but now have the confidence to integrate this into my programme next year, knowing other practitioners are doing this. Health is a life long commitment, therefore it should also be lifelong in a student's school life. Hence, for next year I plan on having health touch points through the year, where it is integrated in every unit we teach.

It would be interesting to hear how health is taught in your schools?

Attached is the powerpoint that I used for my lessons. (http://tinyurl.com/lkl8uwb)

Do note that not all my lessons were presentation based, hence why some lessons are missing. See the teaching ideas page to see the full unit.

#health #Primary #Year5