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NSW Early Stage 1 PDHPE: Healthy and Safe Behaviours

Teach NSW Early Stage 1 PDHPE — Kindergarten healthy choices, personal safety, body parts and movement skills with classroom-ready resources for K teachers.

Expert guide for Australian primary and secondary school teachers. Published by TeachBuySell.

NSW Early Stage 1 PDHPE: Healthy, Safe and Active Foundations

For Kindergarten teachers in a NSW primary school, the Early Stage 1 PDHPE program is the first formal opportunity students have to learn how to look after their bodies, name their emotions, identify trusted adults, and develop fundamental movement skills. Sitting under the NSW PDHPE K-10 Syllabus (2018), Early Stage 1 PDHPE is built around three connected strands — Health, Wellbeing and Relationships; Movement Skill and Performance; and Healthy, Safe and Active Lifestyles — that run in parallel across the whole year.

This guide is for Foundation (Early Stage 1) teachers planning the PDHPE program from scratch, returning to Kindergarten after teaching older grades, or hunting for ready-made teacher resources that match the NSW PDHPE syllabus expectations and the structured-play culture of a Kindergarten classroom.

What Early Stage 1 PDHPE covers across the year

The NSW PDHPE K-10 Syllabus organises Early Stage 1 around content that is intentionally close to the child's own experience. Across the year, Kindergarten students are expected to develop:

  • Health, Wellbeing and Relationships — naming and labelling feelings, identifying trusted people, building friendships, recognising kind and unkind behaviour, and understanding personal identity.
  • Healthy, Safe and Active Lifestyles — personal hygiene, healthy food and drink choices, sun safety, water safety, road and pedestrian safety, recognising warning signs and symbols, and identifying private parts of the body using anatomically accurate names.
  • Movement Skill and Performance — fundamental movement skills (running, jumping, hopping, skipping, galloping, throwing, catching, balancing), spatial awareness, cooperative play, and beginning game-sense activities.

The three strands are explicitly designed to integrate, not be taught in isolation. A typical Foundation week will include short bursts of explicit health teaching ("trusted adult" routines, hand-washing, sun safety), a wellbeing or social-emotional learning circle, and a daily fundamental movement session — often outdoors.

Sequencing PDHPE across Term 1 to Term 4

Most NSW Kindergarten teachers stretch PDHPE content across the year rather than running it as a unit. The Department of Education's sample Scope and Sequence and most published NSW programs cluster the content roughly as follows:

  1. Term 1 — Settling and Safety. Establish classroom routines, identify trusted adults, learn the school's protective behaviours framework (commonly "early warning signs", trusted adult network), name body parts, set up the daily movement program, and begin sun safety with the Cancer Council's "Slip, Slop, Slap, Seek, Slide" message.
  2. Term 2 — Healthy Choices and Hygiene. Healthy food groups, water as the everyday drink, hand-washing routines, dental health, and pedestrian/road safety as students walk to school more in cooler weather.
  3. Term 3 — Friendships and Feelings. Naming emotions in self and others, kind and unkind words, conflict resolution language, basic problem-solving routines, and beginning peer cooperation games.
  4. Term 4 — Active Lifestyles and Water Safety. Water safety, sun safety reset for summer, summer sport tasters (cricket, athletics fundamentals), and a full revisit of fundamental movement skills as students move toward Year 1.

The protective-behaviours and personal-safety content runs continuously across the year — teachers revisit "who I trust, what I do if something feels wrong" routines throughout, not in a single block.

How PDHPE connects to social-emotional learning and wellbeing

For Kindergarten teachers, the PDHPE Health and Wellbeing strand overlaps almost entirely with classroom social-emotional learning (SEL) and behaviour-management practice. There is no clean line between a PDHPE "feelings" lesson and an SEL emotion-regulation routine. Practical Foundation teachers run these together — see our SEL activities guide for emotion-naming and regulation routines that double as Health and Wellbeing teaching, and our self-regulation strategies guide for calm-corner and breathing routines that work from Day One of Kindergarten.

Many Foundation classrooms anchor Term 1 PDHPE to broader behaviour and routine work. If you are also setting up classroom expectations and procedures, our behaviour management strategies guide covers proactive routines and language that align with PDHPE wellbeing content.

Movement and play in the Foundation PDHPE program

Fundamental movement skills are non-negotiable in Early Stage 1 — students need explicit, repeated practice of running, jumping, hopping, skipping, galloping, throwing, catching, and balancing across the year. Most NSW Kindergarten teachers run a short daily movement segment plus one longer weekly PE block on the school's sports day.

Movement and play are also developmental — Foundation students need to refine gross-motor and fine-motor skills in parallel, and the fine motor activities guide collects classroom-ready pencil-grip, scissor-skill, and threading activities that support the same overall coordination. Structured outdoor play with explicit teaching of game rules and turn-taking belongs squarely in PDHPE — see play-based learning activities for play set-ups that target specific movement and social goals.

Teaching protective behaviours and personal safety well

NSW PDHPE includes explicit protective-behaviours content from Early Stage 1, and most NSW schools follow a published framework (often built on the Daniel Morcombe Child Safety Curriculum or similar). Practical principles for Kindergarten:

  • Use anatomically correct names for body parts. The syllabus is explicit that euphemisms make protective-behaviours teaching less effective.
  • Establish a "trusted adult network" early — students name three to five trusted adults inside and outside the family.
  • Teach "early warning signs" language — body cues that something doesn't feel safe.
  • Repeat the content. One protective-behaviours lesson does not embed; short revisits across all four terms do.

The carousels below pull together teacher-created Early Stage 1 PDHPE resources — many bundle feelings posters, body-parts activities, sun-safe and road-safe lessons, fundamental-movement skill cards, and trusted-adult network templates into single classroom-ready packages.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the NSW PDHPE syllabus expect Kindergarten students to learn?

The NSW PDHPE K-10 Syllabus (2018) for Early Stage 1 expects Kindergarten students to learn across three connected strands. In Health, Wellbeing and Relationships, students name feelings, identify trusted adults, and recognise kind behaviour. In Healthy, Safe and Active Lifestyles, they learn personal hygiene, healthy food choices, sun, water and road safety, and protective behaviours. In Movement Skill and Performance, they develop fundamental movement skills — running, jumping, hopping, throwing, catching — and learn cooperative play. The strands run in parallel across the whole year rather than as discrete units.

How much PDHPE time should I timetable in a NSW Kindergarten classroom?

NSW primary schools generally allocate 1.5 to 2 hours per week to PDHPE at Early Stage 1, but the practical reality is that PDHPE content runs throughout the daily classroom routine. A typical Kindergarten day will include a short morning circle that touches on feelings or trusted-adult language, an explicit teaching segment of 10 to 20 minutes on a health or safety topic, a daily fundamental-movement session of 15 to 20 minutes (often outdoors), and protective-behaviours language woven through transitions and recess routines. The dedicated PE block adds the longer movement work each week.

How do I teach protective behaviours and personal safety to Kindergarten students?

Protective-behaviours teaching at Early Stage 1 needs to be explicit, repeated, and use anatomically correct language for body parts. Most NSW schools follow a published framework, commonly the Daniel Morcombe Child Safety Curriculum or similar, and revisit the same core ideas across all four terms rather than teaching one-off lessons. Build a trusted-adult network with each student (three to five named adults inside and outside the family), teach early-warning-sign body cues that something does not feel safe, and use storybooks and role-plays rather than lectures. Repeat the content across the year.

What are fundamental movement skills and how do I teach them at Foundation level?

Fundamental movement skills (FMS) are the building-block movement patterns that support all later sport and physical activity — running, jumping, hopping, skipping, galloping, throwing, catching, balancing, kicking, and rolling. Early Stage 1 students need short, explicit, repeated practice of each skill, with clear teaching points ("watch the ball into your hands", "land soft like a frog"). Run a daily 15-minute movement segment with one focus skill, set up obstacle courses that combine two or three skills, and use peer-watching and self-assessment cards as students move into Term 3 and Term 4.

How does Early Stage 1 PDHPE connect to social-emotional learning?

The NSW PDHPE Health and Wellbeing strand overlaps almost entirely with social-emotional learning (SEL) — emotion naming, self-regulation, friendship skills, conflict resolution, and identifying trusted adults are all formal PDHPE syllabus content as well as core SEL competencies. Most NSW Kindergarten teachers run them together rather than as separate programs. A morning circle that names feelings doubles as PDHPE Health and Wellbeing teaching and as a calm-corner SEL routine. Aligning the language across both — same emotion words, same regulation strategies — makes the teaching far more efficient and the content stickier for students.