Moving and feeling good
Grade 6 wellness is about decisions that touch other people: listening to someone who disagrees, weighing a risk before taking it, and understanding that borrowing money always costs something.
What Alberta asks for by the end of Grade 6
The subject: Physical education and wellness
- Analyze motivation, and take part in moderate-to-vigorous activity that supports training principles.
- Understand the structure of physical activities, and adapt movement patterns across them.
- Analyze and apply conflict resolution in physical activity.
- Consider a variety of perspectives to build healthy relationships.
- Examine risk and what influences a decision to act.
- Examine how access to food affects decisions about nutrition.
- Examine the physical, social, personal and environmental changes of adolescence, and human reproduction from fertilization to birth.
- Investigate the risks and benefits of borrowing and investing.
Grade 6 wellness includes human reproduction, from fertilization to birth. Since September 2025, Alberta schools must tell parents at least 30 days before lessons that deal primarily and explicitly with human sexuality, and a child takes part only if a parent opts them in — ask the school how it is handling these lessons. Borrowing and investing are new this year, the first time the curriculum puts a number on the cost of a choice. There is no achievement test in wellness.
The words, first
These are the terms a teacher will use at a parent interview, defined before anything below uses them.
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Moderate-to-vigorous | Activity that makes you breathe hard: you can talk but not sing (moderate), or can only say a few words (vigorous). |
| Training principles | Rules for getting fitter safely: overload a little, progress gradually, keep at it. FITT is how they are usually taught. |
| Movement pattern | A combination of skills used across sports: the same throwing pattern serves a baseball, a football and a badminton smash. |
| I-statement | Saying how something affects you without blaming: “I feel left out when…” instead of “You always…” |
| Healthy risk, unsafe risk | A risk that could help you grow, like trying out for a team, against one that could hurt you or others. |
| Food access | Whether a family can actually get healthy food: money, distance to a store, transportation, season, time and a kitchen all count. |
| Borrow, lend | Take money now and pay it back later; give money now and be paid back later. |
| Interest | The extra paid for borrowing money. It is how lenders earn money, and why borrowing costs more than saving up. |
| Credit | Being trusted to pay later. Credit cards, loans and buy-now-pay-later plans are all credit. |
| Investing | Buying something expected to earn money or grow in value — stocks, bonds, real estate. It can also lose value. |
Frequency
How often: days a week.
Intensity
How hard: can you talk, sing, or only gasp?
Time
How long: minutes each time.
Type
What kind: running, swimming, skating, lifting.
What to do at home
- Count a week of movement — Canada's guidelines are 60 minutes of huffing-and-puffing activity a day. Keeping a tally for one week is eye-opening for everyone.
- Disagree well, on purpose — Take opposite sides on something small, then each say back the other's reason before arguing. It is harder than it sounds.
- Talk through a dare — What could happen, how likely is it, and who else would be affected? Grade 6 is asked to think before the risk, not after.
- Compare grocery prices — The same basket costs different amounts in different stores and towns. Food far from cities, especially flown in, costs much more.
- Show the cost of borrowing — If a phone costs $600 or $35 a month for 24 months, how much more is the monthly plan? Let them work it out.
- Let them save for something — Saving up for a thing, rather than getting it now, is the most useful money lesson there is.
Sheets you can print for this
- A FITT week — training principles
- Hear them out — disagreeing and staying friends
- Think it through — risks and decisions
- Food access — what decides what a family can eat
- Borrowing money — the cost of getting it now
The expectations above are paraphrased from Alberta Education's Grade 6 programs of study, published on new LearnAlberta.