Special Subjects (Grade 6)

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.

Personal Safety

• Describe the role of individual versus shared responsibility in staying safe in a variety of situations.
• Evaluate potential options and consequences for decisions related to personal safety in a variety of situations.

Physical Activity and Fitness

• Effectively apply team building and problem-solving strategies, in varied contexts, during various physical activities.

• Apply strategies for overcoming individual or group challenges or problems in a physical activity setting. 
• Implement effective offensive and defensive strategies during game play for a variety of games. 
• Recognize and implement safe and appropriate behaviors during physical activity and with exercise equipment.
• Demonstrate the ability to follow game rules in a variety of physical activity situations and apply and respect the importance of etiquette.
• Apply dynamic and static stretching to exercise in warm-up, cool down, flexibility, endurance, and physical activities.
• Compare and contrast health-related and skill-related fitness components and principles.

Healthy Relationships

• Explain why consent and respecting a person’s boundaries are important.
• Demonstrate techniques and assertive responses to counter coercive tactics in order to maintain boundaries. 

Mental and Emotional Health

• Apply refusal or negotiation skills in ways that support or improve mental health and minimize health risks. 

Physical Activity and Fitness

• Understand and accept others’ differences during a variety of physical activities.
• Exhibit responsible social behaviors by respectfully interacting with others, including and cooperating with classmates, asking for help when needed for self and others, maintaining positive relationships, and collaborating productively on problem-solving initiatives during adventure activities, large-group initiatives, and/or game play.
• Collaboratively establish norms and guidelines for resolving conflicts and use those rules/guidelines/agreements to resolve conflict or respond to participants’ ethical and unethical behavior during physical activity.
• Exhibit developmentally-appropriate command of locomotor and non-locomotor skills, rhythm, and timing.
• Demonstrate developmentally-appropriate manipulative skills in a variety of practice tasks, small sides games and other physical activities.
• Effectively combine and apply locomotor, stability/non-locomotor (e.g., weight transfer), and manipulative skills in a variety of athletic and physical activities, and game play.
• Demonstrate effective techniques related to developing muscular strength and endurance, including appropriate and safe use of exercise machines, free weights, and bodyweight exercises.

Public, Community and Environmental Health

• Demonstrate the importance of food to all people and how food is used to keep us healthy, return us to health, and connect us.

Physical Health and Hygiene

• Access personal health products based on individual needs, and evaluate the ease of accessibility and use.

Nutrition and Balanced Eating

• Demonstrate the importance of food to all people and how food is used to keep us healthy, return us to health, and connect us.
• Analyze a variety of influences on nutrition-related beliefs and behaviors, and today’s society.
• Identify personal dietary needs and goals, and advocate to address the identified needs and goals.

Personal Safety

• State a position, supported by accurate information, that encourages peers to adopt or continue practices that maintain or enhance personal safety. [HPE]
• Demonstrate how to influence and support others to make choices that maintain or enhance personal safety.

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