Category: Elementary School

Within this category, essays and articles focus on effectively teaching children in the pre-school and elementary grades. It’s a great place to find teaching tips and get advice from experienced practitioners.

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Nutrition in the Gymnasium

Recently my wife, Kelly Strong, lost an elementary level health educator in her district. Losing this important resource made the district examine what it could do within the physical education curriculum to meet this need. The elementary physical educators created a committee to develop nutrition lessons they could integrate into PE classes. They met and looked at the current elementary health education lessons and modified them to be applicable to physical education settings. As you know, eating right contributes significantly to our health. What follows are some examples of the lessons the teachers developed to teach nutrition. They illustrate some of the many ways physical and health educators could collaborate to integrate curriculum in a more meaningful way for their students.

Lesson 1: Fruits and Veggies (k-2)

Student Learning Outcomes – At the end of this lesson the students will be able to: 1) identify fruits and vegetables, 2) connect fruits and vegetables to their appropriate sections on “MyPlate,” and 3) understand how many servings are suggested per day.

Introduction – Have the kids brainstorm a list of fruits and veggies on chart paper, “Which ones grow on trees/vines?” “Which ones grow in the ground?” (some kids actually think fruit snacks are a fruit!). Show the MyPlate website (or applicable hard copy materials) and explain that fruits will be red and veggies will be green during today’s lesson.

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Advocating for Our Profession: Crafting Your Message (Part 3)

part 1 | part 2

In this three-part series of articles on advocating for our profession, I explained why we need to advocate and I focused on the single most important audience you really must plan to advocate to – your school board. In this last article I want to get down to the difficult but key task of actually creating an effective advocacy message.

But first let me restate my three rules of advocacy because I’ll refer to these three rules as I explain how to develop an advocacy message:

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Adult Behaviors Should Guide Physical Education

Twenty-five years ago, the Assistant Commissioner of Education for New York State (L. Meno) asked all twenty-six content areas in New York public education (Math, English, Science, Social Studies, Music, Home Economics, Physical Education, and so on.), to justify their content area’s impact on “Adult Behavior.” In short, he was asking about the significance of each content area and why it was important to society. It was an interesting question. It forced us to question the impact and importance of physical education to ourselves and to society.

At the time, I was asked to chair the committee responsible for responding to the Commissioner’s request. It gave my colleagues and I a chance to reflect upon the impact of physical education on adult behaviors and to identify what was critically important about our content. Why should parents and community members be willing to continue to support New York state’s physical education requirement and be happy to fund it through their school tax dollars?

The question posed to us also assumes, and rightly so, that what we do in public school physical education with children has an impact on their behavior later as an adult. It made us think about the fact that when children have negative experiences in physical education it will likely result in negative feelings about physical education and physical activity as adults. Persistently scoring in the lower half of a fitness or skill test also risks negative outcomes. It seemed obvious to us in New York state that we had far too many parents and school administrators who after having negative experiences in physical education as children grew up unwilling to support the physical education as it currently existed.

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It’s all about Student Learning! National Standards and Grade-Level Outcomes for K – 12 Physical Education

After three years of meetings, member reviews, and lots of re-writes, the National Standards and Grade-level Outcomes for K – 12 Physical Education are available on the SHAPE America (AAHPERD) website. This document was the work of the NASPE Curriculum Framework Task Force, which was charged with creating a framework (not a curriculum) that included the revised national K – 12 standards and newly developed grade-level outcomes. Physical educators had expressed a need for grade-level outcomes, which would fill a gap they saw between the standards and curriculum development.

This gap existed because standards are intentionally written broadly to reflect what students should have learned at the end of their physical education programs. In contrast, curriculum development requires an understanding of what students should know and be able to do at various points along the way. By identifying what students should know and be able to do at each grade-level, the new outcomes are designed to provide the guideposts to achieving the standards and a physically educated (now “physically literate”) individual. The completed document serves as a framework for public school physical educators to use for instructional planning, as well as a tool for communicating with parents, administrators, and policy makers about what students should be learning in quality physical education programs.

The task force members included two university professors (Stevie Chepko and me), two practicing physical education teachers (Brad Rettig and Dan Persse), a Director of Physical Education (Georgi Roberts) and a retired teacher and well-known author (Shirley Holt-Hale). From the beginning we knew that creating a curriculum framework would not be a quick or easy project, but we were convinced it was an important one for the field and well worth our efforts. The great support we received from K-12 teachers, other discipline specialists, and AAHPERD reinforced our commitment to the project. In this essay I’d like to expand on the research and thinking that guided the task force in its work, and how with its focus on student learning, the standards and outcomes document can positively impact and strengthen the future of our profession.

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Celebrating Healthy Hearts in PE

February is the month I like to focus on rope jumping skills with my elementary students and the unit culminates with a Jump Rope for Heart event. People will often ask me, “How can you do rope jumping for an entire month?” The answer to that is simple. With my physical education classes meeting only two times per week for all the grade levels (I have 1st through 5th grades), each child actually attends only six classes (and that’s if they’re not sick or on vacation!). More often than not, I find that six classes is insufficient for this unit as there is so much you can do with rope jumping!

As a general rule (modifications apply for the younger students who are just learning versus the older students who are more advanced), the first week is spent on individual jumping skills (two classes worth); the second week is for partner jumping one day and long jump ropes the next; the third week is jumping stations (two classes). Our Jump Rope for Heart event is scheduled after school the last day of the unit. Tying in the heart with the high level activity of jumping rope is a great way to get more in-depth about the heart and how we can keep our bodies healthy through moderate to vigorous exercise. In years past I have also done a heart obstacle course, which is also fun. There are many examples of how to do this. One such example can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FoucFF9lDo? (also shown below).

For the stations, I include a jumping obstacle course that includes broad jump, leaping, low vaulting, plyometrics, hopscotch, and timed zigzag skier jumps. Other station areas include pogo sticks & mini-trampolines, long jump ropes, and short jump ropes (the students can work on their Kangaroo Club sheets here -full description follows!). My unit begins with an overview of how the heart works and why exercise is good for us. If you are a Jump Rope for Heart coordinator you know that there are many terrific resources available in the coordinator kit. The American Heart Association has excellent DVD’s with many jump rope skills (individual, partner, and long jump rope) that come with your coordinator kit if you decide to do a Jump Rope for Heart event. You can just google “Jump Rope Skills” for a wealth of resources but here are a couple of websites that show images of tricks:

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Advocating for Our Profession: Presenting to Your School Board (Part 2)

Advocacy is preventive medicine and in this second in a series of three articles on advocating for your profession it’s worth reviewing the first of the three rules of advocacy that I laid out in Part 1. The First rule of advocacy is Do Some – It Works.

For advocacy to truly be preventive you must do some and one of the best places to advocate is with your school board. School board meetings are public venues where a wide range of decision makers and policy influencers are present. It’s a perfect setting in which to direct and influence the discussion and understanding of health, physical activity, and the role a quality physical education program plays in the development of our children. When and what you present to the School Board will be crucial in determining how effective your advocacy is and whether it is truly preventive medicine.

In my previous article, I pointed out the parallels between martial arts and job protection and made the case for an offensive-defense strategy. In martial arts you want to make your opponent think twice before even attempting to hit you. In physical education, offensive-defense is what you do when times are good to ensure that your district will not even consider attacking your program during tough economic times. The time to advocate with your school board is not when there is trouble but when things are going well and you have a positive story to tell.

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This is Why I Teach!

Physical educators love their jobs. There isn’t anything that we would rather be doing. You’ll have to excuse my Buffalo Bills’ reference here, but as Marv Levy has said, “Where else would you rather be than right here, right now?” Of course there are always days when things don’t all go accordingly to plan, or someone or something gets in the way of you excelling at your job. But for the most part, physical educators have the best job in the world! We have a chance every day to shape young minds and bodies toward a healthy life.

 

As someone who has taught for more than 30 years, there have been a few “aha” moments that have made me say, “that’s why I teach!” I’d like to share some with you. I’m hoping that reading my list will help you through those tough times when a person or thing gets in your way and remind you why you chose this great profession. After reading through my list, I’m certain that you could easily come up with a unique list for yourself. Enjoy!

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