Leveraging Recess and Physical Education to Promote Social-Emotional Learning

Recess is ideal for students to accumulate recommended physical activity minutes and work on social-emotional learning skills. However, many students fail to meet national physical activity guidelines, and recess is often withheld from students for a myriad of reasons, including behavioral issues. Helping students build social-emotional skills and providing opportunities to utilize skills at school can help them succeed in school and their future careers. Furthermore, teaching students low organized, student-initiated games provides students with activities they can use at recess, which may keep them more physically active. Thus, the purpose of this article is to share how one physical educator implemented a recess unit into physical education to (a) work on students' social-emotional learning skills, particularly those needed in gameplay, (b) introduce games that can be played at recess, and (c) how to evaluate recess before and after a recess unit. The article will share games, social-emotional skill-building activities, and evaluation tools. As a physical educator, you can build social-emotional skills and teach recess games with physical education. These efforts can potentially improve the school recess environment from a behavioral perspective and increase students' physical activity time.