How can we engage ourselves in healthy lifestyles? How can we maintain active lifestyles without playing a team sport? These are some of the questions 11th and 12th grade IB students at Roberto Clemente Community Academy are exploring.
In their Physical Education classes, students participate in warm-up activities when entering the gym, and from that point, Clemente Wildcats move into a variety of mixed team sport activities. For those students that don’t feel comfortable in certain team sports, they participate in a Lifetime Fitness aspect of class where they can choose to be active a variety of other ways, so as long as they are moving and burning calories.
Currently, students are experimenting with pedometers in class, which has been an interesting piece of technology for them to use. Pedometers allow students to count how many steps they take. The students will set goals, practicing the lifelong skill of setting goals about fitness, and then they’re able to track their progress throughout the class. In many instances, students will start moving faster and faster to make sure they reach their goal, unwilling to miss their mark before the class is over! Of all the juniors and seniors, there has yet to be a student that has given up or not to reach their step goal. Clemente students are learning how they can motivate themselves to reach self-determined goals and stay fit for life.
Next students will be experimenting with different activities to see what gets them to use more steps, as well as how the steps translate to calories burned. We will then be tracking progress weekly along with some graphing, to track progress throughout the rest of the year. While PE might not seem the place to be preparing for the SAT, having students work with graphing their fitness goals allows them to prepare for understanding and analyzing graphs that show up on the test.
These fitness skills and personal knowledge will help them for the remainder of their lives, help them to be conscious of their activity levels and prevent being sedentary for long periods of time. The Clemente Wildcats are getting healthy!