2026 HPEC Award Winners

Congratulations to all the 2026 HPEC Award Winners. HPEC awards were presented at the 2026 HPEC Conference held at the Banff Centre in April 2026.

Robert Routledge Address: Dr. Dwayne Sheehan

HPEC Distinguished Service Award: Dr. Stacy Hannay

HPEC Certificate of Commendations:

HPEC Southeast Region: Jaime Hamilton 

HPEC Central Region:         Fiona Hicks 

HPEC Greater Edmonton Region: Renee Przyswitt 

HPEC Southwest Region: AJ Bergenhenengpuwen

HPEC Central West Region:        Sidney Lewis

HPEC Calgary Region:         Kelly Van Vugt

HPEC Greater Calgary Region: Deb Sellers 

HPEC Northwest Region:         Todd Schweitzer

HPEC Edmonton Region: Karen Fedun 

HPEC Northeast Region: Colby Bowers

Congratulations to all the 2026 HPEC Award Winners!

Healthy Eating & Active Living!

Submitted by: Elise Murphy, 2026 HPEC Grant Recipient

If you teach elementary PE, you know the struggle of teaching Wellness Outcomes while also getting students their mandated physical activity. I’ve curated a list of activities we do in PEW for either warm ups, or main activities, specifically covering some Healthy Eating outcomes while also Active Living outcomes!

 

Lesson 1 - Fill Your Plate! (Geared towards grade 2-4)

Materials: 

• Food Guide Poster (https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/publications/food-nutrition/educational-poster.html)

• Frisbees (1 per student or per pair)

• Printouts of different food options (make your own or order from https://prairies.teachnutrition.ca/en/material-and-resources/products/food-picture-kit-order-here/) I usually make my own to include options from their diet already (hot dogs, KD, chicken nuggets, tacos, etc.)

 

Give the students a review of food guidelines (which provide information on the variety of foods the body needs - PEW 2) 

Print a poster or draw a plate, and include a variety of options for sources of vegetables & fruits, protein foods and whole grain foods. Have a class discussion and include for students to enjoy their food, cook more often, eat with others and practice moderation with some. 

 

The students will examine personal food preferences and explore other foods. Start with students on the border of the gym, with the food cards in the middle of the gym, spread out, upside down. Each pair or group of three has their own “plate”. On go, the students will grab a new card (they have to keep what they pick up, no trades yet), and bring it back to their plate. The team has to work relay style, and once they have a plate that meets the food guidelines, they can raise their hands and call their teacher over to check it. This always lends to excellent conversation on trying new foods, preferences and how some houses eat different foods than yours. 

 

Examples of cues:

Create a meal with at least 3 different colours. 

Create a meal for after your sport or dance practice (protein & carb rich). PEW

Create a meal for breakfast. 

Create a meal with 1 food you’ve never eaten before. 

 

Wrap up: How do you feel when you eat what’s on your plate? What does your plate look like when your family is celebrating something special (traditions). What foods were missing from the food cards? 

 

Warm up: Allergy Tag!

Grade 2

Intro: 

Food allergies are when one’s body reacts unusually to food! Allergic reactions to food can range from mild to severe, including anaphylactic shock. (PEW 2)

Identify common allergens AND examine food preferences (just because you don’t like something, doesn’t mean you’re allergic to it). (PEW 2)

 

Activity: Choose a few students to be “it” using a pool noodle or ball to tag, and explain that they are carrying a lunch with an allergen. If you get tagged by the allergen, you have an allergic reaction (pretend to sneeze, feel itchy, get hives, difficulty breathing, etc.). Then add a handful of students who are either Epi-pens, or a nurse/ambulance. These students (with a hula hoop), need to observe and help those having allergic reactions. They do this by placing the hoop around their classmates. The student who was tagged, and saved, becomes the new “saver”! 

 

Wrap up by explaining that some students have these allergies and we need to be careful with what we pack in our lunches and save allergens for at home. Lastly, explain what to do if an allergic reaction happens to someone in our class or in our homes. 

 

Warm up: Food Card Heads up!

Grade 3 

 

Resources:

If you’ve never checked it out, TeachNutrition.ca has a plethora of excellent, curriculum linked, FREE resources including food bingo (https://prairies.teachnutrition.ca/en/material-and-resources/types/activities/). Order a copy of food cards for this game!

 

Review with students the characteristics of foods and how cooking, storing, freezing, drying, can affect this. Then, play “Heads up”, using food cards in groups of 2-4 (on teams or not). Place the cards on one side of your gym space (or the middle), and the teams will stand on the other side (or in the middle). 

Ex. I’m holding a card (I can’t see it) and my team has to describe the food to me, how it’s eaten, texture, taste, when it’s raw/cooked. If I guess it, we keep the card, and my teammate runs/walks/skips/etc. to get a new card. Within 4 minutes, how many can your team guess!

 

I would include these class discussions and activities in our grading, as a completion and on their way out the door, ask them a simple question such as “Tell me a common allergen on your way out the door” OR “Tell me about a new food you’re going to try soon”! 

 

Hopefully these activities work for your students and spaces and Healthy Eating outcomes seem more achievable!

 

 

Capturing Student Voice in PE Class

 Submitted by: Adam Pratt, HPEC Comprehensive School Health Representative

Do you ever struggle to get rid of a good box? How about a solid coffee can? Well as a frugal (ok, maybe cheap) PE teacher working on a shoe-string budget, I figured I’d keep some old coffee cans around just in case I found some use for them. Originally I thought they’d serve my students well in our future outdoor classroom space, capturing bugs, rocks, and all kinds of natural things, but they ended up capturing something else. 

Student voice and choice is important in education. If you want to read more about why, you can visit https://www.pescholar.com/insight/using-student-voice-in-pe/ and dive deeper into the multiple articles outlined. But even if we know it’s important, how can we effectively capture it? I teach 550 students a day, across six grades, 45-65 students at a time, for just 30 minutes. Needless to say, I don’t think having a conversation with each student is likely a realistic solution. I also frequently use the “thumb check-in” (thumbs up, sideways, or down), but this can be difficult to quantify. Thankfully I’m remarkably stubborn when I want to try to improve my practice, so if student voice is deemed as important by the experts, I figured I better try to find a way to harness it!

This is where my handy-dandy coffee tins came into play. I decided to cut a hole in the lid of five cans and labelled them “Hate,” “Dislike,” “OK,” “Like,” and “Love.” (Sometimes I change the labels depending on the question asked). I then found some old wooden chips I had laying around (wait…am I a hoarder?) and figured they would serve as good voting tokens. My plan was to simply pose a “question of the week,” give every student a single chip, and on their way out of the gymnasium they could cast their vote anonymously.

While my original intention was to ask students a question every week, that goal may have been a bit ambitious (weird how I “just” teach PE and can be so busy, right? ;) ). Regardless, over the last two to three years, I’ve collected some interesting and surprising data. And while it may not meet university ethics requirements, it has informed, supported, and guided my practice. It has allowed me to justify certain field trips, gauge interest in guest instructors/programs, reconsider common misconceptions about certain activities, and served as evidence to support my desire to provide students with a variety of social-groupings during PE class activities. 

The questions I’ve posed and “data” I’ve collected has also sparked future ideas and conversations to try to more accurately capture student voice. This includes conversations about voting on a spectrum (not everything can be a love or a hate after all), as well as the idea to pose questions where students get multiple chips to vote so they can make more than one choice. In the future, I am also hopeful I will be able to select volunteer students who voted differently to have short conversations with them about why they voted the way they did. That way I can gather qualitative data to gauge their primary motive for voting certain ways (e.g., an activity being too challenging versus being put on a team they didn’t like).   

So the next time you see a coffee tin laying around the house and think, hey, that could be useful, I encourage you to keep it. You might capture something unexpected inside!

*If you have any ideas for questions you think I should ask my students, or want to share ways you’ve gathered student voice, please email me at hpeccsh@gmail.com* 

**My wooden chips came from an amazing dance residency hosted by SoundKreations - if you haven’t heard of them, check them out! You may even be able to access a grant to get them in for free!

***Here are some sample results of what I’ve gathered over the years:

Grade 3 Students (n: 96) - How did you feel about PE this year?
Hate	Dislike	OK	Like	Love
2	1	7	17	69
2.08%	1.04%	7.29%	17.71%	71.88%

Grade 3/4/5 Students (n: 331) - Favourite Group Composition in PE
Individual  (1 person)	Partner/Trio (2-3ppl)	Small Group (4-10ppl)	Large Group (10-20ppl)	Whole Class (20+ppl)
14	101	88	57	71
4.23%	30.51%	26.59%	17.22%	21.45%

Grade 3/4/5 Students who played Intramurals (comp and rec, n: 154)
Hate	Dislike	OK	Like	Love
4	5	6	29	110
2.60%	3.25%	3.90%	18.83%	71.53%

Grade 2-5 Students (n: 451) - How do you feel about “Top 10/Most Improved Lists” being posted?
Hate	Dislike	OK	Like	Love
38	24	114	78	197
8.43%	5.32%	25.28%	17.29%	43.68%