Hey Reader!
My physical education program includes activities that might seem a little odd at first glance. Mountain biking, skateboarding, fire building, hunting... there's no lack of risk in any given week.
As a reminder, I teach Primary (a.k.a Kindergarten) to Grade Two. If you have any experience with these grades, you probably already know that tears come with the territory. Every bump comes with a deluge of tears, and each scrape is perceived as life-threatening (at least initially).
While I'm not here to dive into the salutogenic underpinnings of my teaching philosophy, I will say that my goal is to empower my students to get the most out of life and that I believe developing a healthy relationship with risk is essential to that goal. Just like any healthy relationship, developing a relationship with risk requires spending time with it, getting to know it, and coming to understand what makes it tick.
It also means learning how to handle risk when things don't go as planned.
Don't get me wrong: my topmost priority is and always has been to keep my students safe. That being said, I do not believe that the best way to do so is by bubble wrapping them and keeping them out of harm's way at all costs. Bumps and bruises are sometimes part of how we learn, because learning comes from doing.
So here's how I flipped the script: rather than designing a physical education program that is as safe as possible, I've built one that is as safe as necessary. Instead of going crazy trying to figure out how to prevent kids from getting hurt (which, as they constantly prove to me, is impossible), I've chosen to teach them what to do when they do get hurt so that it becomes less scary.
For the first time in my teaching career, I decided to teach my P-2 students about first aid. Having seen the lasting impact of these lessons, I 100% regret having not taught them earlier!
Here's how I went about it:
⛑️ First-Aid Lessons
The first part of making getting hurt less scary for students was to teach them that some injuries are small and some injuries are serious.
The difference between the two doesn't have to do with the pain involved (getting hurt hurts), it just has to do with who needs to get involved to care for the injury.
Small injuries include things like scrapes, bumps, bruises, scratches, and small cuts. While they definitely can hurt, caring for these injuries is usually pretty straight forward: clean it, ice it, patch it, or leave it. Once students know how to care for each of these small injuries, they can learn how to perform first aid on themselves (more on that in a sec).
Serious injuries include things like head injuries, bleeding that cannot be controlled, broken bones, sprains, passing out, or asthma attacks. These situations need to be treated with special care, so getting adults involved is essential.
To practice identifying small injuries from serious ones, my students played a modified version of Hospital Tag.
Got tagged by a tagger? Hold on to the area you got tagged and keep fleeing. Got tagged a second time? Hold on to the second area you got tagged and sit down.
First aiders are in the game wheeling their stretchers (scooters) to help sitting players. Once at a sitting player, the first aiders rolls an injury die.
I made the injury dice with pocket dice that I ordered on Amazon. Each die showcases four small injuries and two serious injuries. If the die lands on a small injury, the first aider and sitting player can "care for" the injury there and the player gets back in the game. If the die lands on a serious injury, the sitting player hops on the first aider's stretcher and gets wheeled to the hospital. Once there, the "injured" player recites one piece of personal information (full name, home address, home phone number) and goes back into the game.
The small vs serious language has stuck with my students. When a kid gets hurt in class, most of the tears are coming from fear rather than pain (as most injuries in class are small and not serious). Identifying the injury as a small one has helped students calm down so much faster than they would have prior to our first aid lessons. Here's the language I use with my students:
👨🏻🏫: "Is this a small or serious injury?"
🧒🏽: "Small"
👨🏻🏫: "Remember, small doesn't mean that it doesn't hurt. It just means you don't have to be afraid of it. Let's patch you up."
The language has helped my students gain a sense of control in a situation where they initially felt helpless. That's an empowering feeling, and definitely one that I wish I had known how to give my students earlier in my career.
If you'd like to read more about my efforts to empower my students through first aid, check out the full blog post by hitting the button below. I go over three more ideas that I introduced in my teaching that have had a lasting impact on my students, both in PE and at home!
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Happy Teaching!
Joey
Joey Feith
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