Physical Education

Physical Education

At Clayton St John we believe that leading active lives helps to improve fitness and mental well-being. To support our children’s development, we dedicate two hours of PE lessons per week for every child in Years One to Six. During these lessons, children are taught essential skills such as balance, hand-eye co-ordination and throwing and catching. Children are also taught social skills through team games, where children understand that working as a team is the best way to succeed with a given task and encourages children to communicate with one another to reach a desired goal.

We also offer different sports after schools clubs including badminton and karate. We would like to expand the number of sport after school clubs based on the children’s interests. In addition to this, we also take our children to competitions outside of school and expose our children to formal competition outlets. We find that this kind of experience improves our children’s confidence and resilience and actually impacts on other areas of their learning.

We now have a forest school area which is used to provide outdoor learning. The children have developed their gross motor skills through free and easy movement round the Forest School site. They developed fine motor skills by making objects and structures. Increased respect for the environment was developed as well as an interest in their natural surroundings.

Physical Education has close links with Science, Maths and PSHCE. This enables children to make links between their Physical Education learning and things they have learned in other subjects.

The national curriculum for physical education aims to ensure that all pupils:

· Develop competence to excel in a broad range of physical activities

· Are physically active for sustained periods of time

· Engage in competitive sports and activities

· Lead healthy, active lives.

· All children in Year 5 participate in swimming lessons once a week

Across the year we assess the children’s progress not just in the sport itself but also the skills they have developed. Be good at sport means developing skills to help them become physically fitter and improve their motor skills.

By the end of Y6 we want our pupils to:-

• develop competence to excel in a broad range of physical activities
• are physically active for sustained periods of time
• engage in competitive sports and activities
• lead healthy, active lives