Dr. Mark Tremblay, Director of HALO, was recently interviewed for a series being run in the Globe and Mail on children’s fitness and education. The title of Part 1 of the series is, “War on child obesity: out of the cafeteria and onto the playground.”
From Part 1 of the series:
A lot of Canadian children aren’t getting 30 minutes of physical activity a day at school. The Globe and Mail compared levels of activity required by provincial education ministries across Canada and they vary from as little as none for some high school students to 60 minutes a day.
Dr. Tremblay is developing a measure he calls physical literacy, one that tracks not only fitness but motor skill development, behaviour and knowledge of healthy living. He’d like to see such measures become a component of standardized testing and given the same scrutiny as literacy and numeracy.
“A school can be doing a miserable job or a fantastic job and it just doesn’t matter,” he said. “This is the future health of our kids – how can we not prioritize that?”
Click here to read Part 1 in full.
