Developing educational tools that incorporate basic movements of judo into physical education classes for eight-years-old elementary school students

Abstract

Judo has been a mandatory aspect of physical education classes at junior high schools in Japan since 2012. However, unlike swimming and dance, judo is considered a form of exercise that students learn after starting junior high school. Therefore, there is no systematic curriculum organized according to the developmental stage of students that covers the period, including elementary school, up to the junior high school. Yogi et al. (2022) conducted a study emphasizing the systematic nature of physical education classes at elementary school up to the junior high school, examining the lower grades of elementary school. Therefore, the current study developed educational tools that incorporate basic movements of judo into the learning content of physical education classes for students in the middle grades of elementary school (eight-years-old children) and examined the usefulness of those educational tools by testing the physical fitness and motor skills of the students. An elementary school affiliated with a national university cooperated in implementing the lessons. The participants comprised six boys and six girls in the third grade of elementary school (all aged eight), for a total of 12 participants. The intervention was conducted in March 2022, involving a total of six lesson plans. A survey was conducted to examine the usefulness of the developed educational tools, assessing students’ performance using the following exercises to test physical fitness and motor skills: dustcloth walk, grip strength, and paired ball walk. The results of this study demonstrated a significant improvement in the time that students took to move forward and backward in the dustcloth walk exercise. Furthermore, students’ performance in terms of the left-hand grip strength and time required to complete the paired ball walk exercise showed significant improvements. The results suggest that the educational tools developed in this study, incorporating basic movements of judo into the learning content of physical education classes, may prove useful for classes in the middle grades of elementary school (eight-years-old students). The generic and practical nature of the educational tools developed in this study means that they may also be useful for instructional programs outside of physical education classes, such as judo clubs for children of the same age.