With the quarantine, I have definitely had a lot of time to think and reflect. It is 2:42 am as I write this article because sleep has been evading me lately. My mind races and it has been difficult to focus my thoughts. So here I am, trying to focus on the positives and contemplate things that I have learned during the quarantine.
Our Health/PE Community is Amazing
The way the Health and PE community has come together to share ideas and help our students has been spectacular. I am so proud of our profession and the way we all came together to help each other during this pandemic. Our amazing professionals have been sharing lesson ideas, files, handouts, virtual field days, and virtual field trips across the internet. Normal lessons or activities that would be sold on a web site like Teachers pay Teachers or on their individual sites have been offered to our community for free. Our amazing professionals have shared with us editable files that we can adapt to meet the individual needs of our students. We have helped each other start our Google Classrooms, figure out Google Meets and Zoom, create virtual bitmoji classrooms, share documents and interactive videos, or just by offering words of support or encouragement. It has been such a joy interacting with other PE professionals. We are certainly in this together and it has been comforting knowing we are there for each other. Some of the amazing communities I am a part of are:
Adapted PE Specialist
PL3Y Kids Fitness
PE Teacher Community
Physical Education Workshop Presenters
Elementary PE Teachers
Elementary PE Teacher.com
The PE Lounge
@Lynn Hefele (her Brain Bites are great)
@CapnPetesPE
Families are Spending More Time Together Being Active!
More parents are getting kids away from excess screen time and technology and getting them to move and be more active. A lot of my families have commented on how they do my assignments as a family. One of the positives of this quarantine is spending more time with our families and getting back to the things we value the most. We can use this quarantine to inspire more families to spend more time being active together, practice healthy eating habits, and ways to reduce stressors together. We can use this as a platform to inspire more families to make fitness an integral part of everyday life. Parents are seeing first-hand the value of movement and activity and how it enhances focus, attention, and drive and provides much-needed stress relief. Parents are noticing how their children can focus and perform better on school tasks after exercise breaks. While we know this as Health and PE professionals, having the parents witness the evidence first-hand makes them a powerful advocate for our profession. It is our job to constantly remind them of all the amazing benefits exercise has within our daily lives.
If you haven’t already, try to provide as many opportunities to get families to be active together. I just created a 5K family scavenger hunt where families can walk or bike ride around town following the map I created. I labeled 24 locations on the map and asked a question at each location that the students would only be able to answer if they were indeed at the exact location on the map. For example, when students got to location #2 they had to answer the following questions: What year did Hayden, Joe, and Bobby write their names in the cement? If they were at that exact point, they would look and see the three names etched in the cement followed by the year 2015. Families have reported that they really enjoy these opportunities to share these experiences with the kids. I had a parent tell me that it brought him back to feeling like a kid again and how he forgot just how much fun fitness could and should be. In addition, I created follow-along exercise games and videos where kids have to compete against a family member. In addition, I crafted interactive games families can do together on my YouTube channel. These games are great because they can battle their siblings or parents. They send me videos of themselves engaged and it is such a joy to see them happy and playing together.
It’s Okay to Admit We Can’t Do It All
So, I dropped the ball the other day (or in this case, it was my phone) when I was trying to juggle a million things at once. My three children and I took a break from our schoolwork to take our new dog for a walk. I was walking the dog while talking to my kids about their school assignments and trying to respond to a work email from my phone when I dropped my phone. My phone could not have fallen at a more inopportune time or place. It fell on the perfect diagonal and landed in the sewer. It was as if divine hands guided that phone directly to the sewer. Just before I dropped my phone I remember thinking to myself that I should wait till I got home to respond to the email and just take these few minutes to enjoy my kids. I didn’t. I continued to answer the email because I convinced myself it could not wait. Well, it would have to now because my phone was far down that sewer and there was no way to retrieve it.
While reflecting on the actual chances of this happening again in my lifetime, I feel that there was an important message or lesson I needed to learn. I learned that I should take advantage of every opportunity to be present at the moment with my children. I learned it was impossible to juggle it all. Sometimes we are going to drop the ball and we have to give ourselves permission or forgiveness when we fail, especially during these trying times, during the quarantine. I told my daughter about these thoughts and she said to me, “ Mommy, I thought you said never to give up.” I told her I wasn’t giving up but simply prioritizing what’s important in each moment. At that moment, it would have benefited me most by just being present with my kids.
A Daily Focus Should Be Placed on Both Physical and Mental Health
Our Physical Education classes need to focus on both the student’s physical health as well as their mental health, now more than ever. Some people view them as two separate entities. They are equally as important and should never be thought of as separate from each other. They both directly influence one another. We can do more to help our students. I have Zones of Regulation signs on both sides of the doors to my gym. Every day when the students enter my gym they tap where they are currently in the Zones of Regulations. The Zones are a systematic, cognitive behavior approach used to teach students self-regulation by helping them categorize how they are feeling. The posters I hang in the gym help the students become more aware of their emotions and help to label them. Under each zone, I have attached three tools/strategies to help students move to or remain in the green zone. This is great to do at the beginning of class because it allows me a chance to assess my student’s emotional state and gives me time during the class to check-in with the students who may be struggling.
During quarantine, it is super important to continue this work with the kids at home. Some strategies to do this include providing the students with Zone of Regulation visuals for home, Virtual zone check-in tools, tools of the week, and have students create family home toolboxes. Go to the site below for amazing resources and ideas to support distance learning. (http://www.zonesofregulation.com/distance-learning-resources.html)
Importance of Face to Face Contact and Constant Communication with Our Students
I have received so many positive responses from our parents/students because I remain connected to my students. I remind my parents that I need that face-to-face connection and communication with my students as much as they need it. It’s reciprocal. I do weekly Google Meets and activities with my Kindergarten – second-grade students and my third – fifth-grade students. I usually have anywhere between 30-65 kids on a Google Classroom at a time. I also use my Remind app to keep in touch with the parents and see how I can best help them with online learning. I also keep in touch with the parents in regard to the social and emotional welfare of my students. I reach out to the parents to see if any of the kids are down and could use a phone call from me to try to lift their spirits. Since this quarantine has started, I have had at least 50 parents reach out to me asking if I could call their son/daughter for a one on one Facetime chat, send a video, join a birthday parade, etc.
Each video, phone call, Facetime call, Google Meets has been a privilege for me. These private moments with my students are so beneficial for them as it is for me. PE teachers wear capes in the eyes of our elementary students. We can be the positive moment of the day for them just by a simple phone call, letter, gesture. I implore you all to reach out to your parents, reach out to your classroom teachers, reach out to your school psychologists, and see how you can assist. Identify which students may need a little extra love and attention! Some kids don’t feel comfortable in these large online Google Meets. They don’t like being on camera and online learning does not provide a one-on-one connection to their teacher. Google Meets are very hard to provide the students with that individual attention that they seek and need. We can do more.
At this time, I worry a great deal about our student’s social-emotional health. If you can’t make phone calls then write an email or letter. Reach out to as many students as you can. This will never take the place of face-to-face contact in school but it will help them in the transition. No, we are not psychologists but we can be a set of ears for the kids and a virtual shoulder for them when they need it most.
— Contribute an Article on HPE —
Contact: pheamerica20@gmail.com
