Schools make PE fun for students

Aconundrum in elementary and middle schools is that while students enjoy outdoor activities they dislike physical education courses. Jiading District has set out to fix the problem.

Since 2015, Shanghai has carried out physical education curriculum reforms such as making PE courses in elementary schools more interesting and those in middle schools more diversified.

This year, a dozen elementary schools in Jiading have been selected as the second batch of pilot reform projects.

Each elementary school will have at least four PE classes and two PE extracurricular activities, while each middle school will have four PE classes and one PE extra-curricular activity.

Among them, the primary and middle schools affiliated with Tongji University have imported teaching staff from Tongji University to hold courses on football, martial arts, cheerleading, swimming and basketball.

In one of the primary school’s martial arts classes, PE teacher Du Changhong showed the basic moves of

a martial arts form, which piqued the interest of girls in his class.

Du said basic physical exercise is important, but it should also be interesting. So he made some tweaks to the to make it more interesting and acceptable to students.

“The students used to be uninterested and passive in PE classes. Now they have become much more active, and they would sweat all over after one PE class is finished,” the school’s principal said.

Other than structural changes, some schools in Jiading have made more diversified changes to their PE classes, which not only builds the students’ physical bodies but also their moral characters.

One official with Luwan No. 1 Central Primary School’s Jiading campus said the students now enjoy to break a sweat in PE classes, which they enjoy.

Zhou Yuhao, a second grader, said when his cheerleading classes showed the students new moves, they all screamed in excitement.

“We’d have only watched those movies on TV and have never thought we could actually learn the moves ourselves,” said Zhou.

Softball and fencing are introduced to make girls more interested in sports.

The school also plans to use high technologies to improve the quality of PE classes through collecting data.