Lessons From the Heart: Individualizing PE with Heart Rate Monitors

by Beth Kirkpatrick, NASPE Teacher of the Year
and Burton Birnbaum, Polar Electro, Inc.

Heart rate monitors (HRMs) are making it easier than ever before for both students and teachers to be fully accountable. They allow students to become responsible for their individual efforts and enable teachers to objectively determine each student's progress toward personal fitness goals. Kirkpatrick and Birnbaum present 38 practical lesson plans designed to stimulate student learning and motivation through the use of HRMs. All of the lessons have interdisciplinary applications, and many of them include reproducible worksheets. To make it easy for you to incorporate the lessons into your class, each lesson includes goals, key concepts, materials needed, a description of the activity, and helpful teaching tips. Lessons From the Heart also provides essential background information about the structure and function of the heart, methods for measuring heart rate, and the use of heart rate monitors in the classroom.

136 pages. 1997. ISBN 0880117648.