Page 78 - The Ontario Curriculum, Grades 9-12: Health and Physical Education, 2015 - revised

THE ONTARIO CURRICULUM, GRADES 9–12 | Health and Physical Education
skills, students in health and physical education need to be able to communicate orally by listening and speaking and to communicate physically through body language. (Oral communication skills are traditionally thought to include using and interpreting body language. In the health and physical education curriculum, this skill is broadened into its own category of “physical communication skills”.) Developing these skills will help students to acquire other learning in health and physical education and to communicate their understanding of what they have learned.
Physical communication skills are fundamental to the development of physical literacy. Students learn to understand how their bodies move and how to use their bodies to communicate their intended movements. They learn to adjust their movements through self-correction and peer feedback in order to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of the action. Students learn to use their bodies to express their feelings and share information and also learn to interpret body language for a variety of purposes, such as recognizing signs of danger and resistance in the body language of others, recognizing physical signs of emotions during conflict resolution, and reading body cues in personal interactions
or game situations. To develop their physical communication skills, students need to observe movement and to practise moving and expressing themselves through their bodies. Physical education activities and active and experiential learning in health education provide students with numerous opportunities for hands-on practice and observation of the physical communication skills that allow them to send, interpret, and receive information without saying a word.
Although physical communication skills are an important component of health and physical education, oral communication skills are also a key part of the development
of health and physical literacy and are essential for thinking and learning. Through purposeful talk, students not only learn to communicate information but also to explore and to understand ideas and concepts, identify and solve problems, organize their experience and knowledge, and express and clarify their thoughts, feelings, and opinions. To develop their oral communication skills, students need numerous opportunities to talk about a range of topics in health and physical education. These opportunities are available throughout the curriculum. The expectations in all strands give students a chance to engage in brainstorming, reporting, and other oral activities to identify what they know about a new topic, discuss strategies for solving a problem, present and defend ideas or debate issues, and offer critiques or feedback on work, skill demonstrations, or opinions expressed by their peers.
Whether students are talking, writing, or showing their understanding in health and physical education, teachers can prompt them, through questioning, to explain the reasoning that they have applied to a particular solution or strategy, or to reflect on
what they have done. Because rich, open-ended questioning is the starting point for effective inquiry or for addressing a problem, it is important that teachers model this style of questioning for their students and allow students multiple opportunities to ask, and find answers to, their own questions.
When reading texts related to health and physical education, students use a different
set of skills than they do when reading fiction. They need to understand vocabulary and terminology that are unique to health and physical education, and must be able to interpret symbols, charts, and diagrams. To help students construct meaning, it is essential that teachers continue to help students develop their reading skills and strategies when they
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