Physical Activity for Children (National Childhood Obesity Awareness Month)

Below is the transcription to the above audio:

This is KNOWTIFY.

My name is Sarah Massey and I’m the North Dakota school health specialist. Encouraging kids at a young age to make healthy choices are going to help them develop the skills they need to become lifelong healthy, active adults. Schools should take an active role in providing 60 minutes of physical activity every day. This does not just include during physical education classes. Classroom teachers should be taking physical activity breaks throughout the day.

Brain breaks are basically a break for the brain that teachers can use to get kids up and moving and doing physical activity each day. What you might see are teachers putting rap videos with movement on their ActivBoards and their students simply get up and they follow the video on the ActivBoard. This increases their oxygen and their blood to their brain, which also helps with their learning development.

They also can take academics and apply movement to those. You might see something like with poems and movement and just incorporating the academics and the movement all at the same time. Parents can play a vital role in encouraging their students’ classroom teacher to be physically active simply by asking the question. We recommend the whole school, whole community, whole child approach or model. What this means is that anyone that is involved in the child’s life is responsible for getting that physical activity every day. We all have to remember that we’re under one same goal. We want our students to be happy, we want them to be healthy, and we want them to be well educated. By combining physical activity and academics together, we will attain that goal.

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