Teaching physical education involves more than just getting your students moving. You also want to give them useful health and fitness information. Classroom teachers may have limited time for diving deeply into PE concepts with their students. I teach PE full-time, and I still need to balance time spent discussing health concepts with time spent engaging in activities. A tool I call quick messaging is an important part of my program, and it’s a great tool for classroom teachers as well. A quick message is a health fact or a brief statement about fitness that ties in with the activities your students are doing or are about to do.
The idea is to use short statements—easy-to-grasp concepts—that you can repeat throughout the school year. Here’s an example. You are about to initiate a tag game with your students. You could say, “Children are supposed to get 60 minutes of exercise per day, and we will be working towards that goal in this activity.” Referring to the 60-minutes guideline is a great quick message. It’s a crucial concept, it’s easy to state quickly, and you can repeat it often throughout the year.
I’ve identified five key health messages for children that you can use to kick-start your quick-messaging campaign. Three relate to fitness, the other two relate to diet.
- You should do at least 60 minutes of physical activity every day.
- You need to get 60 minutes of exercise a day, but you don’t have to do it all at once—do 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there—it all adds up.
- Physical activity should be fun. Choose things you like to do.
- Eat plenty of fruit and vegetables, but keep those salty, sugary, processed foods to a minimum.
- Avoid soft drinks.
Don’t limit yourself to the PE setting when you share these messages. If you observe a group of students with healthy lunches, you might say to the class, “these students did not have a soda with their lunches—good choice!”
The long-term health of your students will depend more on the choices they make after they leave elementary school than the activities they participate in as elementary students. Equipping them with an understanding of how to make healthy choices as they move through life is extremely important. By focusing on these quick health messages repeatedly, you help give your students the knowledge they need to make healthy choices.
