How can it help with your learning?

Physical therapy

﻿Hello there, my name is Sophie Brazier. I'm a children's physiotherapist. Thank you for joining me today for our lesson. So we're in unit six, and this is lesson five, and we are looking at endurance. And today we'll look at how endurance can help your learning. So thinking about a school day and thinking about how having some endurance can help you at school. So what we'll do first is we'll have a look at a few of those things and a recap of what endurance is and how it can affect your learning. And then we will look at an activity, and the activity we'll look at today is going to be using a balloon. So for the activity, you will need to have a balloon. And if you need any help from a parent or carer, you might want to ask them now, and then we can get started with today's lesson. I'd just like to give you a little message from our team. We as therapists have tried to think of the best way to continue to support children, young people and their families. So we will be exploring topic areas that we regularly provide advice and support on across all ages and abilities. Each lesson will have ideas and activities that can be carried out either at home or in school. And any information I'm giving you is to be used alongside any specific strategies or resources that may have been given to you by your child's school, or perhaps a therapist. So if you have got any questions, or you need help tailoring this to their needs, then please contact your local therapy service. So let's have a little look at why is endurance important. So endurance can contribute to your overall health. Building your endurance can improve, not only your physical body, but also your mind. You may then have more energy, which can help with everyday activities without getting tired too quickly. This can then also help with concentration, which is good for learning because you'll be able to focus for longer on an activity or a task that you're doing. And remember, it can also be fun to exercise and build your endurance. So you might be thinking, "How can this help my learning?" So let's just think about a day at school. So not only when you're moving around at playtime, so you're using energy and you're needing that energy to have fun, but then you need energy to be able to maintain those positions and maintain that focus when you're in an activity in a lesson. So it is important to save energy for when you need to be still in your body. So when you're using your core strength for concentrating, so for things like handwriting, your body needs to be steady for you to use your arm. So just as much as it's great to have a lovely time at playtime, racing around on the playground, you also need to remember that you need to balance that with the energy that you need for the rest of your school day. So building your endurance can really help you pace that out and balance it across the whole school day and the whole school week. So building endurance can help with your posture when in a static position for periods of time. And I also think this is quite good, it may help you sleep better. So having good endurance and making sure that that's working well means you'll have better focus for learning. So if you slept better and had a good night's sleep, then you're going to be less tired, and you'll have more energy for the day. So this activity is just getting you to look at how long you can keep going before you get tired, really, and little bit about building up some endurance. And we did look at this on the unit on strengthening your limbs. So you might have tried this before, so this is just another idea. So the activity is keeping a balloon up in the air. So for this activity, you'll need a balloon. You need to start with a stable base and standing. So you need to try and keep an inflated balloon up in the air by tapping it with each hand alternately and don't let it touch the floor. So you're going to start off trying to keep it up with 20 taps, then build to 30, and you can move around as you need to keep the balloon up and off the floor. So, if you get good at that and you've practised it before, then maybe see how long you can keep going and keep the balloon off the floor. Please ensure that the area is safe before you begin this activity. So if you're concentrating on the balloon, you need to make sure that you've got a clear area as well. So there'll be a little demonstration of this. And then if you pause the video, you can have a go at yourself, and then rejoin me afterwards. Okay, so you want to be keeping your balloon up in the air. So you're going to be using your hands, and you can play like a keepy-uppy game, so you're going to be keeping it up, and you want to try and do it about 20 times. So you got to use your tummy muscles, you can hit it in different directions, but you want to try and keep it up off the floor. So if you give that a try and see how you get on. Okay. So let's think about that activity a little bit more. How did you manage, was it too hard? If it was, you could try it in sitting, and you could get a partner to bring the balloon back to you. So you could do the tapping just to yourself, or you could do it between you and a partner when you're sitting. If you'd like more, then you could extend it by the balloon tennis that you might've played before, and this is the partner and increase how long you play it for. So this just adds a more fun element to it as well. And try this bit as well for an added extension. When you've tapped the balloon, run on the spot until your partner taps it back. So you tap the balloon, then you do some little marching or some running on the spot and then tap it back. So that just adds in a little bit more, probably increasing your heart rate, so that works a little bit more on endurance as well. So have a think about those options. Give them a try, pause the video, and then rejoin me afterwards. So now we've reached the end of our lesson. I'd like to thank you for joining me today, and I hope you found it useful and you enjoyed the game we played. So please join me next time for lesson six, where we will be looking at how we can start to build endurance. So all that leaves me to say now is thanks again for joining me, have a great rest of your day, and I'll see you very soon, goodbye.

How can it help with your learning?

How can it help with your learning?

These resources were made for remote use during the pandemic, not classroom teaching.

Lesson slides

Lesson details

Key learning points

Content guidance

Supervision

Licence

Lesson video