Empowering Healthy Kids Blog

It’s great to see schools come up with innovative solutions to legislation. Last fall, Florida passed a bill to mandate that students from Kindergarten to Grade 5 required to do 150 minutes of exercise per week. As TampaBay.com reports, some schools are resorting to measuring their 150 minutes in 5 minute or even less exercise blocks. Here are some examples:

• When the law went into effect last fall, some — including Hillsborough — began counting 5-minute exercise breaks and short walks around campus as exercise.
• For five minutes, the kids practice clapping, flying, jumping, marching, lunging and high-fiving. Then the activity break ends.
• Choosing to stick to a plan that has allowed elementary kids to receive daily PE instruction for the past 30 years. The catch: They group several classes together and rely on PE assistants for supervision.

Here are two schools’ methods of meeting the targets:

A typical 30-minute PE session at Cross Bayou Elementary School

Walking from the classroom to the PE field: 3 minutes

Stretching/warming up: 5 minutes

Running a quarter mile: 4 minutes

Instructional time*: 15 minutes

Walking back to the classroom: 3 minutes

*This includes the teacher’s explanation of the activity and the activity itself, which could be passing a basketball, shooting hoops or kicking a soccer ball.

Dale Mabry Elementary: How one school fits in 150 minutes of PE for fourth-graders each week

PE class: 60 minutes

Teacher-directed PE: 60 minutes

Movement in classroom: 20 minutes

Health education: 10 minutes

Meal diaries, nutritional Web sites, activities about 5 minutes

My own opinion is that while this may not be was legislators had in mind, focussing more attention on physcial activity is good. But more importantly the 150 minute targets allow schools the freedom (but not necessarily the resources nor expertise in some cases) to pursue innovative and creative solutions for their students. It would be an interesting research study to see the outcomes of this legislature and the various methods that schools employ actually makes a difference on children’s health.

This entry (Permalink) was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 9:14 pm and is filed under legislation, schools, usa, getting active. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response , or trackback from your own site.