Our school has been participating in the Healthy Active Learning initiative. Growing students’ capabilities has been part of this.

A component of the programme is game design with outcomes focusing on students taking ownership of a game and modifying it which includes adding layers of complexity. Students leading the game are challenged to think about how game design is achieving inclusion and equity of participation; everyone is actively joining in and everyone is able to achieve success and enjoyment.

Our Year 6 Physical Activity Leaders (PALS) have been taking the lead in this initiative; modeling what other Kahikatea students can then apply. These twelve wonderful students attended a PALS workshop day along with a range of other schools including Year 7 & 8 students. This workshop run by Sport Canterbury focused on growing the students’ leadership and communication skills enabling them to introduce physical activity initiatives in their own school. This includes game design.

PALS have been working in threes to run lunchtime activities for a range of year levels. Through experience, they have learned what games worked and which needed modification to work with the children who turned up for that session. PALS realised clear communication was needed as well as keeping instructions simple.

PALS have also been working with other Kahikatea students with the Sports Start folder which is packed full of games with high levels of participation and lots of opportunities for adding complexity. A strength of Sports Start is that it is building physical skills and strategies that are universally applied across the major sports children engage in.

Here are some of the comments made by some Kahikatea students after a recent session.

I enjoy changing and modifying the game because I get to add my own twist. It was fun to teach the game most of the time because we could get feedback to change it.

I found it fun to modify and put everyone’s ideas together.

I liked the first part of the game where it was the original one. The game was mainly related to basketball but can help improve skills for different games that include defense and competitive stuff.

I found the first game very good, everyone was communicating.

I really enjoyed teaching the game. I think it was a good leadership opportunity and a good way to work with kids

The teams were very good. Everyone came up with an idea.

There were three different levels. Level 1 was easy, level 2 was a bit harder and level 3 was the hardest.

Their leadership was really good. When people couldn't hear they brought us all into the middle and got us to sit down. When people talked they made them run around the court.

As a leader for pirates and sailors I think they loved it and really went into all the details. The players were ready to step up to harder challenges. They ended up in the really hard version of the game because they were finding the earlier ones very easy. Alicia, Sofia and I were trying so hard to put more challenges to them.

Something that I really liked was that they kept changing the game to get it right and to make it better.

The reason why I like the third is because it was more challenging than the first and second.

I think the game was fun and that Matai would like to play it. It was fun being a cop because you got to defend.

The second bit was fun where you could only change to dribble using one hand. The third one was where once the police had put a ball back you had to run to the yellow line and once a robber lost their ball they had to run to a yellow line. All round I think it was a really good game and I'd play it again.

A key component of Healthy Active Learning is building deeper connections with community to promote and support being healthy and active. Keep an eye out for the HAL whanau meeting coming up.

Alistair Campbell