One of your top priorities as a school administrator is to direct programming and make decisions to ensure the children in your school are receiving the best education possible. However, physical education is just as important as academic performance in terms of health, happiness, and stress-relief.

Despite its social and psychological importance, recess has been taking a back seat to academic classes in recent years. Yet not only can reducing recess time be stressful to school-aged children, but it can also worsen academic performance.

Why is recess so crucial in children's education?
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines recess as a scheduled time during the elementary school day for unstructured play and physical activity. Recess provides a number of benefits for school-aged children including the following:

• Cognitive benefits: For children to properly process what they've learned during a period of concentrated instruction, it's important that they're given breaks in an unstructured environment. It's for this reason that children who are given periodic breaks throughout the day perform better academically than those who aren't given those breaks.


• Social benefits: Although academic subjects can project valuable knowledge for future learning, recess provides children with the ability to develop communication skills, sharing, cooperation, negotiation, self-control, and coping skills.


• Physical benefits: Obesity remains one of the key problems with today's children. In fact, children between the ages of eight and 18 spend a total of 4.5 hours a day watching TV, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Recess helps to provide children with the necessary physical education they need to reduce stress and promote cardiovascular health.

How can I promote recess at my school?
First, consider increasing the amount of time your students spend outside during recess. Second, be sure you're keeping up to date with the replacement parts necessary for your playground.

Aged and damaged commercial playground equipment can be dangerous to students and may result in liability issues. What's more, broken playground parts can keep students from properly using the commercial playsets your school provides.

Discount Playground Supply offers a wide array of replacement commercial playground parts to keep your school's playground in the best shape possible. To learn more about our available playground supplies, contact Discount Playground Supply today for more information.