Grade 5 — Health and Physical Education
The Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum helps students learn the skills and knowledge they need to lead healthy, active lives and make healthy and safe choices.
There are four parts to the curriculum:
- Healthy Living
- Active Living
- Movement Competence
- Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) Skills.
The learning for each is summarized below, along with some things you can do help to support your child's learning.
Healthy Living (including Mental Health Literacy)
Students learn how to solve problems, make decisions and set goals that are directly related to their own health and well-being. As they explore health concepts and learn how to make healthy choices, students make connections between themselves and the world around them. While mental health literacy is a distinct topic, students learn how mental health is connected to overall health across this entire section and the whole HPE curriculum.
| Area of Focus | What Students Learn About |
|---|---|
| Healthy eating |
Nutrition facts, food labels Media influences — food choices |
| Personal safety and injury prevention |
Supports — injury prevention, responding to emergencies, bullying, violence, consent Strategies — online safety, responding to threats to personal safety Affect of actions, including homophobic comments, on feelings, well-being |
| Substance use, addictions and related behaviours |
Short- and long-term effects of alcohol use Refusal skills — alcohol use and other behaviours Decisions to drink alcohol or use cannabis, influences |
| Human development and sexual health |
Reproductive system Menstruation, sperm production Factors affecting their understanding of themselves and personal identity, including sexual orientation Puberty — emotional, interpersonal stresses; communicating with family |
| Mental health literacy |
How to help others, when to seek help Stigma awareness |
Active Living
Through active participation, students build a foundation for lifelong healthy active living while learning what makes physical activity enjoyable.
| Area of Focus | What Students Learn About |
|---|---|
| Active participation |
Participation in a variety of activities Enjoyment of activity (individual, small-group, and lead-up activities) Factors that motivate or challenge participation in daily physical activity |
| Physical fitness |
Daily physical activity — moderate to vigorous activity, 20 minutes per day, including warm-up and cool down Physical activity and health-related fitness Assessment and monitoring of health-related fitness Developing and implementing personal fitness plans |
| Safety |
Behaviours and procedures that maximize safety of self and others and help to prevent concussions Minimizing environmental health risks |
Movement Competence
Through exploration and participation in a variety of activities, students develop skills, strategies and tactics for moving while building confidence in their own physical abilities.
| Area of Focus | What Students Learn About |
|---|---|
| Movement skills and concepts |
Transitioning from one balance to another, using different body parts (for example, one-leg stand to tripod stand) Jumping and moving with control Sending (for example, throwing, kicking), receiving (for example, stopping, catching) objects, and retaining (for example, dribbling, stick handling) objects |
| Movement strategies |
Understanding the rules and practising the skills needed to participate in a variety of activities Identifying common features and strategies of various physical activities and using tactics to increase success (for example, establishing a breathing rhythm in individual endurance activities) |
Social-Emotional Learning Skills (taught across the HPE curriculum)
This new section of the curriculum helps students foster their own overall health and well-being, positive mental health, resilience and ability to learn and thrive. Students develop social-emotional learning skills to help them with identifying and managing emotions, coping with stress, having positive motivation, building relationships, deepening their sense of self and thinking critically and creatively.
Students apply these everyday skills as part of their learning across the other three parts of the curriculum, and in their experiences at school, at home and in the community.
| Skills in | Examples of What Students Learn to Do |
|---|---|
| Healthy Living |
Show respect for all cultures and all other forms of diversity [building relationships] Describe how media can influence their food choices [thinking critically] |
| Active Living |
Reframe their mindset to focus on strengths when establishing fitness goals [positive motivation] Make connections between being active, working towards personal fitness goals and mental health [thinking critically] |
| Movement Competence |
Explain the idea of “healthy competition”, what it involves and how it can connect to feeling motivated to participate in activities [thinking critically] Explain how trying different approaches, such as adjusting body position or speed, can help with maintaining control of a ball with their feet while running down the field [coping with stress] |
Supporting your child's learning
Parents and schools both have important roles in supporting student learning and well-being. Here are some ways to help:
- Discuss possible emergency situations as a family and plan how to respond.
- Involve your child in learning to make healthy food choices by reading food labels together.
- Talk with your child early about what healthy and unhealthy relationships look like, sound like and feel like.
- Talk with your child about when to try to solve problems alone and when to seek help from a parent or trusted adult.