Healthy Active Living (Physical Education)

If you already have a healthy, active life that incorporates physical activity, or you just would rather not use the school showers, our Healthy Active Living course is for you. In addition to a few written assignments, if you can self-direct 80 hours of physical activity, you can earn a credit at home.

Working independently or with another coach or trainer, you can self-select the ways you want to improve your physical fitness and make a plan that exactly matches your goals. Want to work on your hockey skills? No problem. Want to work on mobility and core strength with Pilates? No problem. What to try 20 different things? No problem.

By logging your workouts with Google Forms and creating some videos showing what you have learned through your fitness journey, you can show that you have done the work to earn a credit in your home, gym, or home gym!

Our physical education courses let students self-direct 80 hours of physical activity, in addition to completing a health unit and an exam task, in order to earn an Ontario high school credit.

Our courses have three major components:

1. A 10-hour health unit
2. Four activity units
3. An exam task

Health Unit

The health unit in each grade consists of an examination of topics in healthy eating (including the concepts of calories, macro- and micronutrients, and food logging), human development, and the ways that various substances (performance-enhancing and recreational) affect our bodies. Assignments are all based on online reading.

Activity Units

Over 80 hours, students create and revise a fitness plan 4 times. Because different sports and activities might have vastly different requirements, these fitness plans might look very different from one another. We suggest splitting the hours up into 20-hour segments, but it is not a hard requirement.

• At the beginning of every segment, students create or modify a fitness plan to help them achieve their goals, as well as completing a planning form on Google Forms to ensure they've thought their plan through.
• Students then execute their plan while logging their hours.
• At the end of every segment, students reflect on their progress by:
  • creating a video demonstrating a skill they have worked on
  • discussing an internal or external struggle they faced in a video interview
  • completing a Google Form self-assessment.

By repeating this process four times, students learn what works for them and how to prioritize their health goals. Over the course of the 80 hours, students choose "a wide and varied range of activities" that must include:

• both indoor and outdoor environments
• maintaining stability while moving
• "sending" and "receiving", which is the concept of throwing and catching, but extended to work for soccer, volleyball, tennis, etc.

Exam Task

After the student has completed the activity components of the course, they create a motivational video for their peers that discusses one component from the health unit, demonstrates a range of skills that they developed, safety tips, and uses data to show the kind of improvements that can be made.