PE lessons are something you picture with high levels of interaction, activity, and engagement. With the current situation, our girls have been thriving in a different environment to the classroom and learning so much more than just the sport.
It builds resilience, teamwork, and social skills like nothing else and to try to re-create that from home is certainly challenging. The PE department decided that they would start up live PE lessons for Summer Term 1 to give our students the interaction with the teacher and their class, albeit slightly different from usual.
Still, we 100% believe that exercising together with the interaction between the teacher and all members of the class has huge benefits, whilst ensuring all students are doing some physical activity at a time when it is more important than ever.
Lessons have largely consisted of some hand-eye-coordination ball skills followed by an exercise to get the class working hard after! There have been circuits, African dance, Tabata, Zumba, HIT workouts, dance circuits, yoga, amongst many other things and it has been great to have excellent attendance and enthusiasm from the classes.
Whilst catering for our PE curriculum we also believe our extra-curricular programme to be of upmost importance and those students wanting things to do more than ever. That is why we are also running separate fitness and skills programmes running for all our Year 7-13 sports teams, run by a member of PE staff, to allow those students to keep their physical and technical ability up. Alongside that our Focus Programme Athletes, scholars, and elite performers, have got live strength and conditioning sessions, as well as live discussion sessions on building up to elite sport relevant topics. Our twitter feed @OHS_Sport also has many sporting ideas, challenges and motivational posts for students to follow too.
We hope that we are enabling all our students to be as active as they want to be, and still gaining some of those extra life skills that PE gives you. We continue to reflect and adapt to give classes and teams the best opportunities possible.