How important is to feel good and healthy? What happens when you don't feel that way?

Grade 1 learners as part of the transdisciplinary theme, "Who We Are", have been inquiring into a healthy lifestyle. These are the lines of inquiry they used in the classroom and in PE:

Homeroom:

• Ways we can keep ourselves healthy. (responsibility)

• Features of a healthy lifestyle. (form) 

• Choices influence our well being. (causation)

PE

 • Become aware of the importance of physical activity in daily life.

 • Recognize basic changes that occur to their bodies when exercising.

The central idea for this unit was: "The choices people make have an impact on their health and well being."

In Physical Education, PE, students have been exploring a range of activities, starting with simple chase and flee games, followed by some mindfulness, yoga, dance and fitness to name a few.

During the different activities and games, learners started to understand the changes that occurred to their body while exercising.

They also noticed that some activities such as yoga or wall climbing do not increase their heart rate as much as others such as dance, play tag games or small-sided football games.

Students shared their understanding of the changes that occur to their bodies while exercising with parents through their digital portfolio in Seesaw.

Here you can see a couple of examples:

We wrapped up our unit with an assessment where students paired up and after playing or doing an activity for 2-3 min, they measured their heartbeat and added a checkmark if they thought the heart rate increased during the activity or an X if they didn't notice anything.

Thanks for supporting your child to have a balanced, healthy life through making choices on food, sleep and activity time. It takes a village.

G1 New UOI: Dance

As part of the transdisciplinary theme, "How We Express Ourselves", G1 learners are starting an inquiry into the movement composition, most specifically, dance.

Last week, first graders shared their wonders about this unit and they chose if they wanted to write them down on the board or if they preferred me to write them down for them.

After addressing the questions together we started our warm-up following some dances from Coach Pirillo and getting really energized for the lesson.

The focus of the lesson was to inquire and learn about one of the elements of dance: Space.

We talked about the big, medium, and small space and the concepts of pathways and directions.

G1 learners drew imaginary straight, curved, and zig-zag lines on the air to show their understanding of pathways. They also thought of the possible directions they could go to, forward, backward, sideways.

After a few minutes picturing their pathway and drawing an imaginary map on the gym, learners started to move their bodies as they listened to the music and used the whole space (big) of the gym.

They understood that space is an important element of dance and the differences of using a small, imaginary square, space and the big, whole gym, space. It was great to see students being curious about how to move and where to go next, exploring the new spaces in a totally different way.