Developing an Integration of Sports and Health Teaching Programs to Improve the Physical and Mental Health of Primary School Students
Authors: Cheng YingQi , Tasnaina Napporn 
Published: January 2025

Background and Aims: At present, China's school physical education focuses on the teaching of sports knowledge and skills, ignoring the individual student's interest in sports activities and health education needs, in recent years, the national education department has required that schools should integrate health education into physical education teaching, but the effect is not obvious, resulting in part of the students' aversion to physical education learning and aversion to emotion, the relevant surveys show that teenagers' rates of myopia, obesity and other indicators are rising year by year The study shows that the myopia rate, obesity rate and other indicators of adolescents are increasing year by year, which seriously affects the physical and mental health of adolescents. From the interdisciplinary perspective of kinesiology and health education, this study aims to develop and implement a teaching program that integrates physical education and health education to improve the physical and mental health of fifth-grade elementary school students. The specific objectives were to improve students' physical skills and health knowledge and to promote their overall physical and mental health development through integrally designed program content.
Methodology: This paper adopts the methods of literature, questionnaire survey, expert interview, and comparative experimental method, and analyzes the G*power software to determine the sample size, conducts questionnaires, physical fitness, psychological, and other pre-tests on the samples, and screens out 60 students aged between 10 and 11 years old in two fifth-grade classes of Jinzhou Elementary School to be the subjects of the experimental experiment: class 1 is the experimental group of 30 people, including 14 boys, girls 16 students; class 2 is the control group of 30 students, of which 13 are boys and 17 are girls. A before-and-after comparison experimental design was used to assess the effect of the new teaching program through tests such as the integrated physical education and health teaching program, students' physical fitness testing instruments, psychometric scales, mean, standard deviation, t-test statistics, and so on.
Results: The experimental results showed that the teaching program integrating physical education and health education had a significant positive effect on improving the physical fitness and mental health of primary school students. This is manifested in the significant improvement of students' BMI, lung capacity, motor skills, and mental health indicators.
Conclusion: The physical education and health integration teaching program proposed in this study not only effectively improves the physical and mental health of primary school students, but also provides new ideas and methods for the reform and development of elementary school education. The empirical results of this study provide a basis for future related research and have certain application value and academic contribution.