This led us to ask the question "What is exercise?" and since then we've been investigating.
We started by making a list of different activities on sticky notes. Then we made a t-chart with a space for things that we thought were exercise and a space for things we thought were not exercise. We could only agree on two things that we thought were definitely exercise:
We left the rest in the 'mystery middle' of our chart because we weren't sure yet and we couldn't agree. We decided that we needed to try out the things that we thought were exercise to show and understand how they were exercise. Luckily we had a swimming field trip planned for the next week! |
How does your body feel after swimming?
| Why is swimming exercise?
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Here are our reflections on soccer's connection to exercise:
Based on our reflections and experiences we made some changes to our chart. We knew from playing that running and kicking a ball are part of soccer so they must also be exercise. |
By using the knowledge we had gained we were then able to make some more decisions about which activities were and were not exercise. We moved some activities to the 'exercise' part of our chart and some to the 'not exercise' part, justifying and recording our thinking for each. We only moved the activity sticky notes if we could all reach an agreement, which left some activities that we were still unsure about. We knew that we had to look for help from someone else and immediate we thought of Mr. Nathan, our PE teacher. "He's always doing exercise!", we said. But then we had to think about the best way to contact him, so we brainstormed a list of possibilities:
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Most of us wanted to talk to Mr. Nathan in person so voted to go to him and take our big paper. Then next day we had PE and had our chance to ask Mr. Nathan. We worked together to bring our big paper outside to the court and straight away got to asking him our questions. He helped us to understand what makes an activity exercise. In the end, we ended up leaving some of our activity sticky notes in the middle -- not because they were a mystery anymore, but because we discovered that they can be both exercise and not exercise depending on how they are done! |
- It makes you stronger. (Zoe)
- Your whole body is moving. (Aziz & Denzil)
So...is yoga exercise??? ....YES!!
- You need it so you can walk to long places and your mummy and daddy don't need to keep carrying you a lot. (Lucy)
- It makes you stronger. (Johnny)
- Like stronger so you can help mummy and daddy carry very heavy things up. (Zoe)
- If you do more exercise you can be more speedy and faster and then if you do it more and more times you'll have more energy next time. (Cameron)
- You need to do it so you can do new things like bounce a ball on your knee. (Denzil)
- Or on your head. (Johnny)
These great ideas connect to one of our lines of inquiry: "The importance of movement in our lives". We'll continue to explore these concepts as our unit continues.