No Excuses! A film about quality physical education.                                                                   Length: 61 minutes 11 seconds                                                                                                                           Producer: John Roussell  phD                                                                                                                               Year: 2014                                                                                                                                                                       Rating: not found

Brief description: This documentary follows the story of the physical education program at the Storefront Academy in Harlem. Throughout the documentary teachers, staff and parents talk about how this program has increased their students involvement with their academics while they increased their physical activity throughout the school day. This program increased the amount of time that students were engaging in physical activity while they were in the class, at recess and also at home. The students also began taking more brain breaks in the class as well as they had made some improvements to the food in the cafeteria to go along with learning about how they should treat their whole body with respect and improve their eating and their physical activity. This film really highlights the reasons that schools have “No Excuses” to get our students more active in and outside of the classroom to support the overall health of our students.

Click here to watch the full length documentary!

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.9                                                                                                             Compare and contrast the treatment of similar themes and topics (e.g., opposition of good and evil) and patterns of events (e.g., the quest) in stories, myths, and traditional literature from different cultures.

NHES 1:                                                                                                                                                                     Describe ways to increase daily physical activity and decrease inactivity                               HBO 1 Engage in moderate to vigorous physical activity for at least sixty minutes every day HBO 7 Support others to be physical active

Lesson: each student will write a compare and contrast piece individually after watching the movie and the documentary on how they incorporate physical activity differently in and out of the classroom. They will write this piece gathering information from both the popular movie and the documentary and they will pair share their writing. (30 mins)