Effective Principles, Policies & Practices For Developing Health And Physical Education In Primary Schools

Resource

Description and benefits

limitation

Avery good website that can help teacher in developing different activities for little children for health development is called the “ A to Z movement for activities for young kids”. This URL https://www.angeliquefelix.com/blog/a-to-z-movement-activities-for-young-kids#E  is a very interesting site which displays the importance of different games which help in development of physical health of children and learn them to work in groups. The site has about 26 activities and is exceptionally interesting in the sense that each and every letter of the alphabet is written down and each of them suggest an interesting game which helps in the physical as well as cognitive development.

One of the games that I had chosen for the children was the Elephant running game. I had taken the concept of the game and had modified it according to the requirement of type student so that everyone can be included in the game. It was conducted as a running game where a particular child was made the hunter and was made the elephant. The other children were made the hunts. The game was that the hunter was made to run after every of the hunts and when he would catch a hunt, that hunt would become the new hunter. This was a game that not only excited the student but helped in including all the children at the same time thereby excluding the chance of any children to be lazy. This had helped in the better development of the motor skill and made the children active.  The first domain that a teacher needs to assess is that the children up to the age of two year old should develop their movement skills. The development of the movement skills is excessively important as this will help them to be active and undertake proper locomotion, dancing, jumping and hopping. Researcher has stated that games that involve physical development should be included in the curriculum in schools along with their cognitive development and speech development (Fairclough et al. 2013). Physical development that takes place through active skills have therefore told by researchers to be one of the foundation of effective learning. Moreover, many expert researchers working over the topic had also stated that active plays include children to play in groups and this help them in developing communicating skills and urge to make social connections. Such group activities that take form of interesting plays also help the children in balancing them and also help them in developing the sense of coordination (Kohl & Cook, 2013). Such active games also help in the development of skills where the children up to two years learn to freely use their hands which in turn help them in developing their motor skills.

However, the main negative aspect of the game was that it had the risk of the children falling down or hurting themselves. This would be the only case of concern. The main, limitation of the website is that although a large number of different activities were noted in the website, it did not provide details about how each of the games helped in developing important skills. Moreover although it was noted that all the games were listed under physical activities, but there were games which were indoor games and were not physically challenging for the students. Moreover another limitation was that it did not depict the exact development that the children learnt from each games but only showed how to conduct the games. However, the limitations are not so vigorous that the website becomes useless. The teacher can overcome the limitations, take ideas from the websites about the activities and also implement them for the children to make them learn properly (van der Neit et al., 2014).

I have selected a resource which is a youtube video with the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqZxDQ4zQ5k. This is a wonderful video which can teach the teacher about how to make the children engaged in adventurous tasks and achieve the goal by overcoming different challenges. This video has a lady named Sophie who will help any teacher who wants to prepare a good intervention to engage her children into an adventurous game.

The activity here is a treasure chest game that will engage children and will help them to develop a sense of inclusion an engage them in group activities. Working in groups is very important to develop speech as well as communication efficiency (Eather, Morgan & Luthans 2013). The children also learn to socialise and mix with different cultures and get a taste of the different cultures. They also learn to work in unity by overcoming self acclaiming behaviour and learn to develop feelings for others (Iserbyt, Ward & Li, 2017). The lady in the video had helped me to plan a treasure hunt game where different clues will be written on a paper and hidden in different areas of the school campus. The groups will be consisting of five children and each group will have the main aim to reach the treasure by following the clues. The clues will be hidden in different areas of the campus and the first clue will have the picture of the next place where the next clue will be present. After the children find this clue, it will have the picture where the second clue will be present and in this way they will reach the treasure. However the lady in the video had made it a little difficult by using small riddles in place of picture of the venues. Therefore a teacher can also increase the level of the difficulty by providing easy to solve riddle in place of images and make them more challenging (Agbuga et al., 2016). Such a game will make the children use their thinking power and the teacher will also be able to understand how their cognitive development and their skill of intelligence have developed. Moreover as the children will compete in groups, it will help them to learn to work as a team thereby sharing their thoughts and feelings and developing their communicating skills. This will be highly adventurous as this will make them excited and the concept of treasure will make them happy as well. This will also help them to be physically active as they will be running around the school campus dir the clues and this will fulfil the aim of the teache (Enegelen et al., 2013).  The second domain which is selected mainly teaches the children of 3 to 4 years to face challenges and how to be calm and composed while facing those challenges in order to overcome barriers to achieve something. This is a very important lesson of life which will ultimately help the children to develop ideas about how to face serious problems and come out of them being victorious (Parker et al., 2017

However, one of the limitations of the using of the resource is that the lady had described the procedure but has not conducted it with real children and therefore the teacher might face problems while conducting the game for the first time as she will not be able to prepare herself properly for handling the children or to solve their inquisitiveness the teacher may face issue as the lady had also not mentioned about the difficulties the teacher may have and have not declared how to overcome the barriers. However, the teacher after the first experience may develop ideas about how to handle the children and thereby will not face nay issues (Ericcson & Karlsson, 2014). The game might also cause falls of the children and therefore the teacher needs o be careful about the health of the child.

The link of the video is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGw7WDVd29k. The resource that a teacher can use to teaching the student is a video that she will need to play on the computer. It would be better if the video is played on smart boards which are an excellent medium of ICT for educating children. The resource that had been selected by the teacher is a wonderful video which show a physical education teacher teaching her students of various ages from age 5 to 10 to practise regular work out sessions.

The next domain that the teacher needs to venture in this scenario is the intervention for 5 to 6 year olds where they will develop the capability to use the information and communication technology in their learning procedures.  This resources is not only helpful for the physical education teacher to learn about how to make the children enjoy working out with songs but will also help them to learn with the medium of ICT (Cremin & Arthur, 2014). They will have practical sessions where the video will be played on smart-board and the children will follow the instruction of the lady in the video. This resource will interest the children as they will have the chance to see a video and dance accordingly in the form of a workout (Saddler et al., 2013). This benefit of ICT is that it will make the teacher’s work much easier as she is not having to organise herself to conduct the workout and monitor the children activities together. This technology will help the children to practice their physical working out skill and the teacher will have rounds monitoring and taking notes of each of the children’s activities to work on them later. Researchers have found that involvement of ICT had not only made teaching easier but had also helped the children to be more excited about their education rather than having a theoretical approach (Lai et al., 2014).

The only negative aspect of using this resource is that it is a continuous video and therefore it cannot be paused in the middle if any children has an issue or is not being able to catch up with the pace of the video. Stopping of the video will result in losing the flow affecting the physical work out session that includes the participation of every child. However regular playing of the video will make then children accustomed to it and therefore the limitation can be overcome.