In Physical and Health Education in our school we are trying to cover social, psychological, emotional and physical factors which affect health. So in sixth grade I decided I wanted to focus on participation in recreation. I thought this would be a good area to look as I wanted the kids to understand how important leisure and recreation time was.
I thought is was important that students had an understanding of what recreation was and as we are an international school, what recreation around he world is. So we discussed factors and influences of participation in recreation such as political influences, financial influences, peer pressure, etc.
Some of the students struggled with this as they either were not used to doing research and having this amount of freedom, or they did not follow directions, or did not seek help when they needed it. Some students flourished with this activity and came up with some very good presentations.
One thing I did find was that the presentations took far longer than I had anticipated. I had a time limit for each person, but sometimes we just got into it too much. There are some things I would change with this next year but allowing the students to have the freedom to research and present in their own way was refreshing.
How have you assessed knowledge in physical education? Do you always do written assessments? How much time does it take you to mark?