At EMES, students begin to participate in Physical Education in Pre-K! During their early years, students learn the basics of moving safely in shared space and how to manipulate objects during play. There is a large emphasis on being safe, respectful and responsible during our learning, and we always have fun!

Your children will slowly build a movement vocabulary appropriate to their age. Our goal is to give your child a sense of success during physical activity, and to give them the tools to enjoy movement and activity for the rest of their life.

Your children may talk about playing tag during PE. But make no mistake; we also learn to do things like run, jump, leap, hop, skip and so many other ways to move! We also have plenty of time to play with equipment and practice throwing, striking (kicking, with hands, with long handled implements), catching, rolling and anything else you can imagine.

Our PE Lab experiences begin in Kindergarten. To learn more about this program, how our movements can be used outside of school, and how you can help, click on the PE LAB tab.

In grades 3 and 4, students start to link together movement concepts and skill themes to create small sided games. What that means is students use skills from their movement vocabulary that they've learned in years past, and strategies they're currently learning to play a modified sport. Sometime these modified or small sided games can be competitive, but we always find a way to focus on the cooperation in their strategy.

This age group also begins new units that focus on fitness, we start Nordic skiing and another unit that is all about team work and cooperation called our Adventure unit. In the Adventure unit, students need to be very resourceful and work in groups to physically solve a common problem they are presented with.

The state of Vermont has requires students in grades 4,7 and 9 to report fitness scores to help track health indicators. We practice and assess these different challenges and focus on students best work and effort. We discuss ways to improve our scores (or our fitness level), why its important to be fit and maintain fitness and how what we do everyday contributes to an active lifestyle. Students perform the different assessments during PE classes, but scores are kept private from classmates. Since we perform the FitnessGram test each year (4,5 and 6th grade) students can track their progress from year to year.

At EMES, our upper school students enjoy many types of movement and games like the younger grades. These students, like in other aspects of life, are afforded more responsibility during the units and games, as their skill set becomes more polished.

At this age, you can expect your child to report home about a reciprocal style of teaching and assessment. What this means is children now are not only playing small sided games, but they are also the score keepers, they are the time keepers, the referees, the coaches, the team trainers, they are setting up the games materials and acting as statisticians. This style is used in many invasion type games like team handball, ultimate frisbee, touch football, capture the flag and many more. Students use cross curricular skills such as in math with data analysis in this style, by looking at information we've collected and finding ways to improve that aspect of the game.

As in other grades, students in the upper grades really take advantage of their PE Lab experiences and start to request some fun activities like canoeing, archery and rock climbing.