Physical Education for the 21st Century
Kindergarten - Body Systems
Central Idea:
To grow up in good health we need to stay active, eat well and follow good hygiene practices
Learner Outcomes:
Active Living:
Engage in a variety of physical activities
Demonstrate an awareness of basic hygiene in their daily routines
Identity:
Describe how they have grown and changed
Acknowledgement:
Andy Vasily
Jarrod Robinson
Lesson 1: Pre-Assessment:
There are many ways to open up a new unit but the key point for the teacher is to make the students excited. Sometimes I show the students a short video but this time the kids came to class seeing a bunch of equipment out for them. This hooked them in straight away.
I arranged 4 stations for them with 3-5 minutes at each one:
Station 1: Jump Rope
Station 2: Hopscotch
Station 3: Sit-Ups
Station 4: Beanbag catch
After 2 rotations, I gathered the students and introduced the unit. This is Kindergarten so the discussions are quite short and sharp. I asked them questions like:
How did your body feel doing the 2 stations?
How come you are sweating?
Why are you breathing fast?
I then showed them the Central Idea, but only for a brief moment since by this stage, that is long enough for them to be setting down. I then sent the kids back to complete their last 2 stations. This time, however, I told them to pay more attention to their breathing, their muscles and heart.
With 5 minutes left of the lesson, we go over the Central Idea and for their homework, I asked them to be active. We will discuss their activities for next class.
See the video below:
Lesson 2: Recording data
• Referring back to the Core Planning Document, specifically “Reportable Skills”, Research skills are listed. After discussing with the homeroom teachers, we discovered that they will be teaching the students about collecting data, analysing it and making conclusions. Therefore, we came up with the students completing the same circuit but after each rotation complete one section of the worksheet. You can find the worksheet below:
In this lesson we also broke down the Central Idea a bit more thoroughly.
What does being active mean?
What is good food?
What is hygiene?
What should we do before we eat our meal?
Do we want to grow up healthy? How do we do that?
Refer back to their homework – who did something active?
Lesson 3:
Looking at the Core Planning Document you can see that one of the concepts is ‘Connection’. We thought it would be a good idea to discover how the muscles, heart and lungs are all connected and all impact the health of our body.
This lesson we looked at the heart in more detail. A great app to use to get the students excited is 4D Anatomy. Click on the app name to get more information about it.
I like to milk the excitement for all it is worth – we are teachers, we are on show – so I ask the class, “Who wants to see their heart?” The majority of kids raise the hands. When you have a whole bunch of students raising their hands, it is a great opportunity to ask a question related to the class. Whoever raises their hand or jumps up first gets to the answer the question. If they are correct, they get to be ‘patient’ (I use this technique a great deal when choosing ‘catchers’ for our activities). E.G.:
What is our Central Idea?
What is our current unit?
Where is the heart located?
What does the heart push? Etc.
So we have our patient, I then get them to lie down in front of me with the piece of paper downloaded and printed from the app. With my iPad/iPhone connected to a projector I announce that I am Dr David and I am about to look inside this student’s heart. The class is generally very wrapped and cannot believe they are seeing what they are seeing. I highly recommend this app.
For the rest of the lesson we engaged in a variety of games and every so often stop and check our hearts. They can feel their chest, the carotid artery underneath their chin or on their wrist. Up to them. But ensure they can feel their pulse somehow.
Lesson 4:
This lesson we engaged a bit deeper in the heart. We looked at exercise intensity. I broke down heart rate into 4 zones:
Dub Dub (slow)
Thud Thud (medium)
Thump Thump (fast)
Boom Boom (very fast)
Click below for the poster:
These 4 zones are easy for the students to remember, particularly when a visual is associated with them.
We went through several activities:
Stuck in the Mud (a chasing game)
2 lap race
A plank off
Lying down for 2 minutes
After each activity we had a class discussion to discover how their heart felt while performing the activity. We then checked our heart at the end of the discussion.
Lesson 5:
For this lesson we reviewed the Central Idea and the heart.
The Learner Outcome for the Active Living strand is:
Engage in a variety of activities
For this lesson I introduced some new games that included teamwork, races, hand-eye coordination etc.
Again, we gathered after each activity to discuss how our heart felt using a variation of the heart poster.
Lesson 6:
This lesson was focused on muscles.
Using the 4D Anatomy again we used another piece of paper and looked at the body as a whole. But focused particularly on the muscles.
Afterwards we played a modified game of Stuck in the Mud. Rather than being allowed to run, the students had to move like a crab (inspired by Zuu workouts). You can choose any animal you want but it needs to really work their muscles.
Afterwards I showed them the 4 muscle zones:
Easy Easy
Ow Ow
Burn Burn
Ouch Ouch
See the poster below:
NOTE: Another great app for anatomy is TinyBop Human Body. Click on the name for more information.
Lesson 7: Formative:
Reviewed previous lesson and the 4 muscle zones.
The students went through a yoga lesson. You can watch the video here:
Afterwards we discussed the activity and how it can help your body. We then looked at how the heart and muscles are connected.
For the final 10-15 minutes of the class. Students completed their formative assessment. I posed them a question and they could write or draw their response on a blank piece of paper:
Tell me everything you have learned so far in this unit.
I encouraged the students to be as creative as possible, they can work with their peers to help each other reflect on the past 6 lessons.
Lesson 8:
Depending upon the responses the lesson can go two ways:
Touch on previous lessons again in a bit more detail to clarify, or
Plow on.
We then looked at the lungs. Using 4D Anatomy again we looked a little bit closer at the lungs and the role it performs in the human body.
After engaging in a variety of physical activities we discussed how their lungs felt (or how fast their breathing was). Again we broke down breathing into 4 zones with pictures associated:
Slow
Medium
Fast
Very Fast
At the end of this lesson we looked at the connections between the heart, muscles and lungs.
Lesson 9:
This is where we start putting things together. We engaged in a variety of physical activities and discussed each of the body systems individually and discovered how the body systems are connected.
We completed a table on the whiteboard with all of the visuals. See below a document representing the board (unfortunately, my board was erased before I could take a photo of it).
Lesson 10: Front Loading:
After our standard warm-up of 2 laps of a team run I broke the students up into groups of 3-4.
There was a great deal of equipment out in front of them in different piles:
Cones
Mats
Medicine Balls
Hula Hoops
Dots, etc.
Working with their groups they needed to design and execute as many different exercises as possible. When a group is happy with their exercise they can show me. I then ask them how their different body systems felt during it.
Lesson 11: Summative Assessment:
Working in different groups, the students complete the same activity they did yesterday, creating their own exercises. This assessment has 3 parts to it:
Creating 2 different exercises and reflecting on both of them
Drawing or writing in response to this question:
What happens when we stay active and eat good food?
View the assessment below:
Questions, comments, click here.