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WINNIPEG — It's an hour before the start of classes, but the gymnasium at Oakenwald Elementary School is quickly filling up with boisterous, laughing kids. The 10- and 11-year-olds from Winnipeg are pumped because this morning they are playing Frogger, a game they invented themselves.
In fact, in a noteworthy turning of the tables, these members of the Xbox generation have taken a 1980s video game and transformed it into a high-intensity retro game of tag.
With the popular Crazy Frog song I Like To Move It blaring, half the preteens run, leap obstacles, dodge bad guys and retrieve tennis balls while the rest of them dash around furiously trying to tag them.
"This is a good way to start the day," says physical-education teacher Ian Bailey, watching intently from the sidelines. "Parents like it because their kids are moving; teachers like it because the kids are wide awake and attentive in class; and, most of all, the kids like it because it's fun."
Oakenwald is the happy exception: a grade school where, in addition to the early-morning program (optional but with an 80-per-cent participation rate), students get 30 minutes daily of physical education -- a school that has received the highest distinction every year since 1990 from the Canadian Association for Health, Physical Education, Recreation and Dance.
Unfortunately, The Globe and Mail found that only 19 school boards of the 74 surveyed across Canada say they have daily physical education in all their schools. And while phys. ed. is mandatory in most boards up to Grade 9, it becomes less so in higher grades -- in Grade 10, the program is optional in 43 per cent of boards, and by Grade 11 it is optional in 78 per cent.
What's more, less than half of school boards nationwide hired physical-education instructors with the applicable postsecondary degree to teach the program, the survey found.
And phys. ed. programs vary wildly around the country, offering as little as 30 minutes a week to more than 30 minutes daily of gym time. At least on paper: Research has shown that, in the average half-hour gym class, children spend only about six minutes actually moving.
"Literacy and numeracy will always be the focus of schools -- and they should be," says Grant McManes, president of CAHPERD. "But I want kids to be musically and physically literate, too. Education is about educating the whole child. Right now, we're not doing that in many schools."
At a time when childhood obesity has become epidemic, physical education and recess are being pushed aside as schools try to maximize instructional time, particularly in areas where there are provincial exams.
"The attitude is that the three r's are the most important, but that's simply not true," says Graham Fishburne, a professor in the faculty of education at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
Prof. Fishburne says that, for more than 70 years, research has demonstrated that increasing classroom time does not correlate with better test scores. Rather, the more active children are, the better they learn.
In fact, a landmark study conducted in 1951 in Vauves, France, found that the school day that maximizes learning consists of two-thirds classroom time, one-third physical education -- and no homework. That research has been replicated many times, with slight permutations but the same results.
"Children don't become brighter because they're physically active but they are less tired, less agitated, less stressed and less sick," Prof. Fishburne says. "Physically active kids are in a better condition for learning."
Yet politicians and policy makers have failed repeatedly to act. "We present the evidence to the ministers of education and they say, 'That's great,' and they do nothing," Prof. Fishburne says.
In the past couple of years, however, the childhood-obesity bulge has become the subject of intense scrutiny -- and governments have begun to act.
Ontario and Alberta have promised daily physical activity (20 and 30 minutes, respectively), B.C. has launched the ambitious Action Schools B.C., Quebec has extended the school week by 50 minutes for activity, and there are moves afoot in most other provinces.
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