Special Subjects (Grade 3)

Norfolk Public Schools: Physical Education and Health Curriculum Overview

The Norfolk Public Schools Physical Education/Health Program is designed to teach students fundamental concepts and skills that promote the development of healthy habits, relationships, and lifelong wellness.

Physical Education Program

The Physical Education program emphasizes active participation in a variety of physical fitness activities and experiences, focusing on the development of:

• Movement Skills: Teaching a variety of locomotor and non-locomotor movement skills.

• Fitness Principles: Exposing students to basic principles of conditioning and training.
• Health Behaviors: Promoting active lifestyles through setting individual fitness goals and making positive health decisions.

Commitment to Inclusion

To ensure all students can successfully participate, the program employs inclusive practice by offering differentiated instruction across activities. NPS promotes an environment where every student is challenged and can be successful by modifying tasks, equipment, and rules to meet the diverse needs, abilities, and experience levels of all learners.

Health Education Program

The Health Education program focuses on teaching students the importance of healthy habits on growth and development, with an emphasis on decision making and problem solving, self-management and goal setting, social awareness, relationships and communication skills, movement skills, self-awareness, information and resource seeking and self-advocacy and health promotion. Through interactive lessons, students explore important concepts across the following content areas:

• Nutrition and Balanced Eating
• Personal Safety
• Physical Activity and Fitness
• Physical Health and Hygiene
• Healthy Relationships*
• Mental and Emotional Health*
• Public, Community, and Environmental Health
• Substance Use and Misuse

*These health topics are taught through the district SEL curriculum.  There are no direct lessons taught in Physical Education classes.  However, learning standards in the Healthy Relationships and Mental and Emotional Health categories around anti-bulllying, teasing, good sportsmanship and persevering through difficulty are reinforced throughout all aspects of our physical education program.

Specialized Units

• Human Growth and Development (Grade 5): Fifth-grade students participate in a program providing an overview of the reproductive system's components, functions, and processes, including the physical changes that occur during puberty.

Note: Parents are notified prior to the beginning of this unit and provided with the opportunity to review instructional materials and may choose to opt out of participation.

D.A.R.E. (Grade 6) 

The health curriculum is supplemented by the D.A.R.E. program, which teaches students decision-making skills to support them in leading lives free from violence, substance abuse, and dangerous behaviors.  This curriculum is taught by our school resource officer, in partnership with our classroom teachers.

Instructional Schedule & Curriculum Design

Students attend Physical Education classes twice a week throughout the school year.

• At the younger grade levels (K-2), one class per month is dedicated to health education.
• At the upper elementary grade levels (3-6), one week a month is dedicated to health education classes between the months of November and May.
• Students at all grade levels participate in between 10-12 dedicated health education classes annually.
• The Physical Education/Health Curriculum is designed to build vertically so that students master core standards from the Massachusetts Comprehensive Health and Physical Education Frameworks by the time they complete sixth grade. The program actively seeks to build strong partnerships through Family and Community Engagement, ensuring that health learning is a shared responsibility between the school and the family.

Nutrition and Balanced Eating

• Demonstrate how to use food labels as part of nutrition-related decision-making. 

Physical Activity and Fitness

• Analyze movement situations and apply the appropriate spatial, movement, and strategic concepts in small-sided practice tasks, game environments, dance, and gymnastics.
•  Apply basic offensive and defensive strategies and tactics in a variety of activities and small-sided games.
• Adjust performance of locomotor, manipulative, and stability skills based on environmental and task constraints and ensure safe physical activity participation of the individual and peers.
• Engage in independent and cooperative problem-solving activities while participating in physical activities.

Physical Health and Hygiene

• Describe personal behaviors and strategies that promote health and/or avoid health risks.

Personal Safety 

• Describe ways to promote personal safety and reduce the risk of unintentional injuries in a variety of situations.
• Identify and demonstrate how to contact appropriate resources when someone is poisoned or injured and needs help.
• Demonstrate the use of assertive behavior, refusal skills, and actions intended for personal safety.

Physical Activity and Fitness

• Demonstrate respect for self and responsible, safe interpersonal behavior that contributes to positive social interaction in a variety of physical activity contexts

• Defines and provides examples of movement activities for developing the health-related fitness components and for developing skill-related fitness components.
• Describe health benefits of regularly participating in physical activity on multiple dimensions of wellness.
• Recognizes and articulates how physical activity influences physiological changes in their body.
• Identify different physical activities, in physical education class and outside of school, for personal enjoyment and challenge, independently and with others.

Physical Activity and Fitness

• Recognizes the role of respectful interactions with others when participating in physical activity.
• Describes why following game rules are important in a physical activity setting.
• Accept, recognize, and actively involve others with both higher and lower skill abilities into physical activities, in and outside of physical education, and group projects.
• Effectively manage emotions in a manner respectful to self and others during physical education and in other physical activity settings.
• Demonstrate strategies for collaborating, working and playing safely and effectively with others, including perspective taking, in physical education and other physical activity settings. 
• Describe the benefits of movement and being physically active, especially with others, on physical, social, and emotional health. 

Physical Activity and Fitness

• Demonstrate developmentally-appropriate patterns of varied locomotor skills, jumping and landing, and step-like actions in a dynamic environment.
• Demonstrate ability to perform various locomotor skills combined with movement concepts during dynamic small-sided games and other athletic and physical activities.
• Demonstrate developmentally-appropriate balancing on different body parts, rolling actions, and weight transfer actions in a dynamic environment.
• Demonstrate the ability to combine locomotor and manipulative skills in a variety of small-sided practice tasks/games.
• Demonstrate developmentally-appropriate manipulative skills with hands in a variety of situations and tasks in a variety of environments.

Competency in these report card standards are the end-of-year goals.

Performance Skills

• Demonstrates age appropriate movement/motor concepts and manipulative skills
• Demonstrates age appropriate understanding of physical fitness and health

Learner Qualities

• Demonstrates sportsmanship and participates fully and cooperatively
• Demonstrates self-control of body, voice, and personal space