Learners, I want to welcome you. My name is Eve Kutchman, and I'm a health educator from Children's Hospital, Colorado. Today, I'm here to talk with you about creating a healthy environment in a school setting. In this video, we're going to talk about physical activity and its role both in and out of school. PA is one of the components of the WSCC model. WSCC stands for whole school, whole community, whole child. And the model is a tool that many educators use to help organize the complexities of school health. Physical activity is important to a child's overall health, and children spend the significant amount of time at school. Therefore, school tends to be a logical place to encourage physical activity. The physical activity section of the WSCC model represents where students have access to comprehensive physical education, or PE. As well as opportunities for physical activity, or PA, before, during, and after the school day. Let's take a look at what these terms mean. You just heard two terms, physical education and physical activity, that sometimes are used interchangeably or synonymously. By that we mean that people think of them as the same thing, but it's important to understand the difference between the two and why both are important. Physical education, or PE, is formal movement instruction. In short, kids need to be taught how to move and given the tools to make movement enjoyable. PE provides the base to develop the physical skills, such as balance, understanding different modes of locomotion. These are ways to move, such as running, jumping, skipping, or hopping, and kinesthetic awareness. KA includes things like being able to jump over an object without running into it, the ability to adjust a movement so you don't run into others, or just being able to move out of the path of a moving object. These all are needed for movement. PE provides the opportunity for students to master movement proficiency or physical literacy, which is considered the ability to move combined with the confidence to move. This sets students up for lifelong participation in physical activity, physical fitness, exercise, and play. Physical education classes, as they're offered in schools, are designed to promote physical fitness, confidence, social skills, teamwork and problem solving. While students are learning movement mastery or perfecting a skill. Think of it in terms of throwing, it takes muscle to launch a ball, but it takes mastery to hit the target. All of these skills are important both in and out of the gym setting. Without the firm foundation of physical education, students lack the tools to engage in meaningful and effective physical activity that sets them up for a lifetime of physical activity enjoyment. Now let's look at physical activity, or PA, which is the opportunity for movement outside the formal physical education setting. Physical activity can be defined as any movement of the body that requires energy expenditure, measured as level of intensity from low to high, or using calories. Exercise, which is considered movement that is planned for the improving or maintaining a physical fitness by increasing heart rate and breathing, is a type of physical activity. But not every physical activity is considered exercise. You may have heard the recommendation from just about everyone, from the CDC to the NFL, that all kids need at least 60 minutes of physical activity everyday. This is a true statement. The benefits of physical activity can be seen in kids who accumulate this amount of PA on a daily basis. These benefits include improving fitness, brain function, focus and concentration. Other benefits include disease prevention, stress reduction, and promoting positive mental health, along with building bones and muscles. Physical activity is important to many more things, but it also helps with weight management. No wonder PA is such an important segment to a school day. We will take a deeper look into these benefits later in this course. But for now it's important to note that when PE and PA join together in the school setting, a change in physical activity culture can occur. We call this the comprehensive school physical activity program, or CSPAP. We will talk about this in detail later in the course. But if you are not ready to take on a comprehensive program, we will also talk about steps you can take that still contribute to increasing activity in your school. In concluding this video, remember, physical education and physical activity are both unique and important to movement proficiency or physical literacy. Which is considered the ability to move, along with the confidence to move. This contributes to the overall health of school-aged children. We will learn about the whys and the hows as we continue through the section. But for now, it's time to get moving, it's time to play.