Eating a bowl of fruit for breakfast, forgoing processed foods like cookies and sugary juices for birthdays, preparing healthy recipes, studying labels to find out how much sugar we are unknowingly consuming… Here are just a few- one of the initiatives of a community of 135 educational centers protected by the common system: el caMiNo de piEFcitos (sic).
These measures are in addition to many others related to physical activity to establish healthy habits which, according to the latest reports from the World Health Organization (WHO), are very necessary. In the 2021 publication, overweight and obesity affected 42.4% of boys and 40.4% of girls aged 6-9 in Spain (European average: 29% of boys and 27% of girls). According to Consumer Unit’s 2019 Aladdin study, childhood obesity is twice as high in low-income households and less-educated parents.
In addition to physical education activities and the usual experience of school sports, every November 12, International Child Obesity Day, physical games, rope skipping, choreography, physical exercises and dances are organized to the rhythm of Jerusalema or dances and acrobatics to the rhythm of the sound of capoeira.
On the other hand, several initiatives such as Nichos Residuo Cero are deployed, joining the actions of the Teachers for the Future Spain group, replacing the plastic and aluminum containers of the snack with lunch boxes, fabric bags and reusable bottles. . Sustainable mobility, respect for the semi-circle and physical activity, use of bicycles, rollerblades, skateboards, hikes… Some centers have repair workshops for bicycles, scooters… such as the bike workshop at the Moñino hypermarket of the IES Rodríguez Monino de Badajoz.
Initiatives of the project “El Camino de PiEFcitos” Carlos Chamorro
The actions are organized around five structuring axes: physical activity, healthy eating, sustainable progress, promotion of literacy and protection against the despotism of screens.
We find ourselves in moments of uncertainty, of human error, of injustices that force us to repair our human capacity to be authentic and to exist. The school, aware of this existence, rebels and negotiates to build valuable school cultures, such as the defense of physical activity and freshness. It needs enlightened projects that provide security and create community networks, ethically valuable, of shared intentions and goals. The PiEFcitos eL CAMiNO program meets these requirements. He managed to build a network of 384 collaborating teachers, 32,104 students and their families and 135 centers of different educational levels.
The program also includes a series of measures that combine study with a pleasant task. For example, for each bag of batteries or sockets, students advance two kilometers on a path that leads them virtually to discover different provinces of Spanish geodesy and to reach one of five levels of freshness (Tourist, Backpacker, Mountain supervision, Mountaineer and Sherpa). .
PieFCitos website. Ponferrada. Synopsis of the kilometers traveled The Immaculate College of Ponferrada.
A healthy snack is 100 meters away and the preparation of a balanced recipe is 5 kilometers away. If you walk every day with your tribe or a community of families, you add two kilometers, and if you go to the center on foot or by bicycle, you add one more. The complete recitation of a compendium, between 15 and 20 kilometers. Use recyclable bags, two. Helping a colleague with what he doesn’t understand, five. Respectful turns in dialogues and encounters, five kilometers… An individual progression that registers and is reflected in the passport of the community of class runners after achieving the various objectives, who also try to obtain the jersey sherpa.
We build the scheme
During the 2018-2019 school year, students at the Cristóbal Colón Nursery and Primary School in the Madrid suburb of Villaverde prepared to create an image that would identify the school. It is intended to represent the wholesome titles that are being developed in the field of physical education. This creates little feet, a smiling centipede surrounded by the interspersed outline title of the acronym Physical Education (PE).
The image appears in different spaces of the patio, the pavilion… in the form of a poster, a polystyrene figurine, embedded in information sheets, diplomas, awards. It is a symbol of the solidarity race which takes place every year in the suburbs. It represents an ambitious and healthy vision of physical activity that has gone beyond the limits of the school and has become a Francoist reference in the promotion of healthy lifestyles.
Outside school hours and the school circuit, students and their families show healthy activities that are recorded and with which they also advance in symbolic kilometers. Little by little, step by step, step by step, jump by jump, they approach each desired destination and thus the hiking community has a path to a video compact made by the students of the educational center of destination. In each compact, in addition to a brief presentation, a story is told to a specific group, a typical healthy recipe, an outstanding provincial athlete, representative monuments, curiosities, myths and legends of the region, folk dances and local festivals.
Happens on ‘the path of little feet’.Carlos Chamorro
Following the Camino de Santiago process, they use a passport stamped with the province, a potential receipt verification stamp. Each teacher-coordinator of the system records the actions carried out by their students in connection with the five areas of activity, duly accredited with supporting documents: photos, images, files, etc.
A school way of life that enlarges the tribe. Carlos Chamorro, physical education teacher at Colegio Cristóbal Colón and promoter of this program, comments: “It is curious, but I have received several emails from families telling me that their children give them advice on food choices when they were shopping. force them to check labels; They remind them of the lack of coming to clean points with the waste of computer equipment, fluorescent lamps, medicines… Some families have even started doing sports and add miles to move around Spain in a healthy way”.
Imagination, interdisciplinarity, activation, awareness, responsibility, group, camaraderie, inclusion, research… are terms that rightly accompany physical education classes that deal with the education of the body, but also to retain, think, repair and realize. . This experience requires opening up to others and co-creating alternative structures and new desires that support the necessary daily work of transfiguring what has been condemned as useless to change. But we don’t stop there, the CaMiNo program of PiEFcitos provides many other references for good teaching. We’ll get to them in the next story.
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