Student-centered Physical Education : Strategies for Developing Middle School Fitness and Skills

Student-Centered Physical Education presents over 100 fun physical activities that not only promote student fitness and skill development but also build the foundation for a physically active life.

The authors' modular approach allows teachers to mix and match activities in order to achieve specific goals, creating multiple opportunities within each class period for students to succeed.

Authors Timothy Smith and Nicholas Cestaro, who together have more than 50 years of teaching experience, have developed a student-centered approach to physical education to replace the outdated, subject-driven approach.

By focusing on the needs of the preadolescent student rather than on sports or calisthenics, this proven program challenges exclusivity, boredom, and gender bias.

Their strategies and activities make physical education relevant to your students and motivate them to participate in physical activity, both in the gym and after school.Part I, "A Student-Centered Modular Approach," helps you develop and organize your classes.

You'll learn how to assemble modular lesson plans and how to increase their effectiveness using the teaching strategies presented.

You'll also find a chapter on authentic assessment, which discusses the use of rubrics, portfolios, and portfolio cards.Next, Part II, "Teaching Modules," provides you with easy-to-follow, step-by-step directions for more than 100 fitness-related activities, including-warm-ups, -skill development activities, -team-oriented activities, and -individual and paired activities.Each activity is ready to be inserted into the modular lesson format presented in Part I.

In addition, you'll find 10 detailed health-fitness modules-one for each month of the school year-that will help you present and reinforce key lifestyle concepts in addition to the "physical" components of physical education.