Objective:
Increasing Activity For All Pupils Through Active Learning
Our Current Challenges
On the whole, the children at our school love sport and are active throughout the week, both inside and outside of school. However, we also have a large number of children who have high levels of screen time and a significant proportion of our population (approximately 30%) are identified as inactive. This has been exacerbated by partial school closure and virtual levelling and levels of inactivity have remained high after the return from partial school closures (60% inactive).
"Meaningful and active outdoor learning is at the heart of our new curriculum design. In the current circumstances that we find ourselves in, this is more important than ever. Teach Active provides an easy, yet meaningful, way to incorporate this in to lessons and provides real learning opportunities for our pupils."
Susan Pollard, Headteacher
Our Approach
Over the last two years, we have been reviewing our curriculum offering and implementation. As part of this, staff have highlighted the importance of providing children with outdoor and active opportunities in order to take a more holistic approach to learning. We have placed a high emphasis on increasing activity levels and have used Teach Active as a way to support the engagement of pupils.
The Impact
As the curriculum is so tightly packed, particularly with the current catch-up programmes in place, fitting in additional physical activity had previously been a challenge. Using Teach Active has allowed us to combine the two elements and the children have thoroughly enjoyed this new way of learning. The resources are easy to use and navigate and require very little preparation, which encourages staff to use the lessons more readily. An additional bonus we have found is that the activities also encourage problem-solving, communication, and teamwork so the children are not only learning but are developing their cooperative skills too - a real bonus of the tasks.
"Not only has it been fantastic to see the children so engaged and involved in the activities, it has really struck me how the tasks are developed in a way that encourage communication, reasoning, problem solving and cooperation - all life long and transferable skills."
Katie Upton, PE Lead
The Future
We have started with a few year groups, using the maths resources, and are gradually building these into more year groups. We will soon begin trialing the English resources too. The children have loved the activities so far and often ask if we can do some of them again - even weeks later which just shows
the impact that they have had.
As we move forward, we are looking to build on the momentum of this year by continuing to use Teach Active to promote active learning and engage all of our children in daily physical activity and a way to promote health and wellbeing.