How can a PE program prepare children for life beyond school? Many people currently working in schools and raising children were raised in the time of “everyone gets a trophy.” Much fun has been made in popular media at the expense of this well-intentioned and perhaps unhelpful practice. But what is the place of competition in an elementary school? Can something good come from a child’s disappointment of losing at a game?
It takes only a few moments of watching a World Cup game or the Astros winning the World Series to see that sports competitions can elicit emotion like nothing else! Children need to experience a range of human emotions in a nurturing environment where they are affirmed and supported. We want them to be able to recognize and name their emotions so they start to gain self-awareness and will be able to read and understand other people’s feelings and emotions. Marc Brackett, author of Permission to Feel: Unlocking the Power of Emotions to Help Our Kids, Ourselves and Our Society Thrive, asserts, “If we can learn to identify, express, and harness our feelings, even the most challenging ones, we can use those emotions to help us create positive, satisfying lives.”
Starting with our youngest learners, The Fay School teaches skills, fitness, and the mindset to have a healthy body and to be able to play common sports. Our Primary students, three- and four-year-olds, have daily Music and Motor classes where they work on becoming aware of their bodies in space, rhythm, and movement. They learn to tumble, kick, hop, and throw a ball. As the grade levels progress, the PE teachers build upon these skills and incorporate them into games and sports. Each school year PE classes begin with reviewing rules and practice of our most beloved recess sports, Gaga Ball and Kick Ball. This helps children better monitor themselves, regulate their expressions of emotions during games, and grow in their sportsmanship. Our ultimate goal in recess games is for children to be able to ref themselves. This can only come to fruition through intentional teaching and guided practice.
The culmination of our PE program in fourth and fifth grade is blue and yellow teams. Each child is placed on the blue or yellow team at the beginning of their Fourth Grade year. Throughout their Fourth and Fifth Grade years, they are introduced to sports they will likely see in middle school, such as baseball, dance, and volleyball. This gives our students foundational skills to enter middle school confidently if they choose to play sports and an idea of what they might enjoy. Even if students don’t choose to be on a sports team in middle school, they will have had the experience of collaboration and the ups and downs it takes to be on any team-debate club, school newspaper, or robotics team. Our blue and yellow teams score points throughout a unit for team spirit by demonstrating sportsmanship and winning. They experience the disappointment of losing and the experience of bouncing back after a loss. Students feel the magic of belonging to a group of people going after a goal together and the elation of triumphing over an opponent. We want students to feel this full range of emotions.
Our PE program is also a way that we teach empathy to our students. Most people model and teach empathetic talk and behavior for people experiencing something bad or uncomfortable, but we teach our children to be empathetic for others when great things happen to them. Being happy for someone else’s good fortune is sometimes harder to do but equally worthy of attention, even into adulthood. We can cheer for our friends when they get a promotion, accomplish a goal, or go on a great trip. Good fortune is not a finite resource; there is plenty to go around in the world!
The Fay School’s vision is to “deliberately build and educate the next generation of leaders for our world.” The world our children will enter as adults will not be like the one we parents have entered. There are many unknowns about the future, but we know that leadership, empathy, emotional intelligence, collaboration, and resiliency will be essential to their futures. Our PE program is one more way Fay leads children into the future!
About the Author: Principal Melissa Sherman spent her childhood stomping through the woods of rural Virginia, taking art classes and dancing, and definitely avoiding team sports at all costs. Through her sporty “at home” children and the amazing PE teachers and coaches she’s worked with over her 25 years in schools, she has learned to recognize and celebrate the positive development from experiencing “the joy of victory and the agony of defeat!” She now splits her time cheering for the blue and yellow teams, as her shirt attests.
