Physical Education in School

The last couple weeks I have been in Sydney I have been volunteering at the Newtown North Public School right next to Sydney University Campus. This week I got to observe a physical education class and it was much different than any class I have ever seen before. This week they were doing gymnastics and it amazed me how much the children seemed to enjoy it. They were participating in activities such as bars, balance beam, and doing handstands. I think if this happened at a gym class in the US there would be many complainers but here there were none! Every child was willing to participate and their skills were impressive. When speaking to the physical education teacher, he said that they work on a lot of different sports in physical education and that the gymnastics is used to develop the students overall skills. When talking to the kids at recess time, they all seemed to love sport. Almost every kid I talked to was on a swim team, and these were young kids! The importance of sports was very evident to me when I heard how enthusiastic these children were about sport.