Exercise and health - school years ?

SunnyDub1

Just seen a thread on another forum about exercise being introduce and having a big part of child's school years. Got me wondering what would the majority of people want re exercise and health for their children, future children.

Personally I think it should be up to parents to ensure a healthy life style for their children, from the ages of 4-12 (when starting school) encouraging them to take up a sport or hobbies and ensuring they eat healthy and not over do it on sweets and treats.

Then in secondary school having each student take part in some sort of training 1-3 days a week for an hr and have canteens etc offering a healthy lunch/snack option.

What do the people of AH think ?

davet82

SunnyDub1 wrote: »

What do the people of AH think ?

i think you should have went to parenting forum with this if you wanted a proper discussion tbh

Martyn1989

Nah PE should be an hour or so everyday

opinion guy

Agree should be at least an hour a day.
Of course it needs to be diverse. You can't just force all the kids to play soccer or GAA if they hate it as happened in my school :rolleyes:
You need to cater for everyone.

Whether school is the best place to deliver this or not is another question

seamus

SunnyDub1 wrote: »

Personally I think it should be up to parents to ensure a healthy life style for their children, from the ages of 4-12 (when starting school) encouraging them to take up a sport or hobbies and ensuring they eat healthy and not over do it on sweets and treats.

Yes and no. Experience has shown us that when you leave it up to parents to make the right choice, big chunks of parents seem to be incapable of doing it. So you often need to make it really easy for them or sometimes just plain shout at them until they do it.

This is why it's important that schools have all sorts of activities available for children to take part in and local sports clubs and such are encouraged and funded.

Primary school children spend 24 hours a week in school and about an hour of that on PE. Which is pathetic. There should be a minimum two hours a week P.E. in primary schools and 4 hours a week in secondary.
There's plenty of room in the curriculum wasted on religion which could be used for this.

Bipolar Joe

I loved nothing better than being thrown around and being made feel subhuman during P.E, I say we have three days completely taken up with it.

JohnMarston

PE for an hour a day should be the law

An hour a week is woefully inadequate

There should also be health classes highlighting the benefits of healthy eating and the effects of a poor diet and exercise routine in secondary school.

Maybe the allocation of a small amount of LC points for those who are able to do PE, based on attendance. Those unable obviously would get those points based on attendance in health classes.

1ZRed

PE would be so much better here if it was like America where you have so many options of sport to choose from and even if that wasn't your thing, you could run track/hurdles/gymnastics or feck it, at a push play dodge ball!

At my school we could only play football or soccer. That's desperate.

Abi

SunnyDub1 wrote: »

Just seen a thread on another forum about exercise being introduce and having a big part of child's school years. Got me wondering what would the majority of people want re exercise and health for their children, future children.

Personally I think it should be up to parents to ensure a healthy life style for their children, from the ages of 4-12 (when starting school) encouraging them to take up a sport or hobbies and ensuring they eat healthy and not over do it on sweets and treats.

Then in secondary school having each student take part in some sort of training 1-3 days a week for an hr and have canteens etc offering a healthy lunch/snack option.

What do the people of AH think ?

I think you're right in saying that children need encouragement on this. I think it is up to the parent to bring their child to different clubs and see what sticks. There is a world of sports and activities out there that they may never know about unless they're shown.

Children (on the whole) are not anywhere near enough as active as they should be, and sadly judging by some of the over weight children I'm seeing their diets are the result of lazy cooking at home, and probably not monitoring what their pocket money is being spent on. I don't think convenience food should be offered more than once a week to a child. Everything should be cooked pretty much from scratch. It removes any need to read packets of ready made meals, because the parent will know what they're being fed.

Going back to the exercise issue, in a secondary school child you can only hope they will still have the enthusiasm that they had for sports they had before. So long as they have some kind of commitment at least twice a week, they should be okay with a balanced diet.

Martyn1989

opinion guy wrote: »

Agree should be at least an hour a day.
Of course it needs to be diverse. You can't just force all the kids to play soccer or GAA if they hate it as happened in my school :rolleyes:
You need to cater for everyone.

Whether school is the best place to deliver this or not is another question

Exactly.

PE was always being let out on a field/carpark with a football, maybe basketball once a month.

Im also in agreement with a few LC points or some other form of merit for people who take part.

Its all to common to see children who are shy or quiet sit back and not participate in PE and sports because their parents don't want to be the bad guy, which only makes it worse. They should be supported, encouraged and sometimes made to try new things.