Literacy in Health and PE

Often times people don't incorporate all that much literacy activities or materials into a physical education setting. It is more prominant within the health classroom, but not so much in PE. I honestly wouldn't want to do too many literacy activities in the actual PE setting because we advocate for as much movement of students during classtime as possible and conducting in debth literacy activities does not match up with that. However, there are smaller ways to incorporate literacy into the classroom. A lot of station work is done within a physical education classroom. Students constantly move from station to station having different tasks to do at each. I think that if it is a station teach, some type of literacy activity could be one of the stations, relevant to the other activities of the day. Let's say the stations of the day are ways to increase and decrease heart rate. The one station on literacy could be to read something short dealing with heart rate and doing a "sketching my way through text" so students can visualize what they are reading and see the flow through sketching of how the body works at increasing heart rate. Little activities could always be done throughout a class that ties in the psycomotor aspect with literacy on what is being done. I also love the idea of exit and admit slips at the end and beginning of each class. This is a great way for students to not only take the physical doing of what they have learned, but be able to express it in writing.

On the health part of all of this, literacy activities are very important. There is so much research, which could also be touched upon in the PE classroom, as well as statistics and facts that are out there about health related issues. This information is not always easy to comprehend and breaking it down so that students actually understand is so important. If they are not undserstanding how and why being heathly in whatever aspect is important, then what they read is almost useless. There are so many great activites that could be done with health lessons that break down reading material such as the think alouds, mapping and anticipation guide. I especially like the anticipation guide in a health setting because it lets students demonstrate their prior knowledge on the topic, which in many cases can be inaccurate. Health information can very easily be tangled with and inaccurate information is all around us. This guide helps to put what students think and know from other sources into comparison with what is presented to them at this point.