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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Marketing Physical Education

Think about your favorite restaurant. What is it about that particular restaurant that makes it your favorite? Chances are it is the combination of quality products, good service, and a great atmosphere that keeps you coming back for more. If any one of these three areas were below standard would you return? You’d probably think twice before recommending the restaurant to your friends.

Now think about your physical education program. Your students may or may not have a choice whether or not to frequent your classroom, but if you are trying to promote your program, then satisfying customers should be your first order of business.

First, take a look at your product. Do you have a quality physical education program that has a variety of skills on the menu? Although students often seem to prefer to play certain games, remember that they only know what they have experienced. Varying your content and using a variety of strategies, technology and also differentiating the instruction will keep students from getting bored and will motivate them to move with purpose. Furthermore, students who find your classes intellectually as well as physically challenging will be more likely to talk about, “What they did in PE today,” to their parents.

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Promote Physical Education By Making Connections

As a public school physical educator do you ever feel that you are the “best kept secret” around? Because what you do and what you offer children is so vitally important, do you find it hard to believe that no one really knows, or understands what you are really all about? Do you sometimes think to yourself, “If only they knew!”

Well, what are you waiting for? Why not let others know the importance of your physical education program? In fact if you want others to support your program and appreciate your teaching it’s vital to make time to become a PE promoter. But here’s the key: you need to do it in the context of how you fit into what others are trying to do, whether they be kids, staff, parents, or school board members.

Too often, physical education is viewed as simply a scheduled break in a classroom teacher’s day. Of course this is not the case everywhere. Thankfully there are people who understand the importance of PE and respect its place in the school’s curriculum. If you are already a part of one such building or district, congratulations! Your hard work promoting your program has been successful. Keep up the good work! Hopefully, this article will give you more ideas you can use to continue your PE promotion efforts.

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Should we be Concerned about Increased Public Support for Physical Education’s Mission?

In case you missed it, there was what appears good news for school physical education and its mission this fall. Here’s a sampling:

According to a CDC report, the worrying perceptions many of us have had of ongoing program and position cuts and declining support for K-12 physical education were wrong. In the recently released 2012 School Health Policies and Practices Study (SHPPS), a 10% increase was reported in the percentage of school districts requiring elementary school physical education over the past 12 years.

At the middle school level there was almost a doubling of the percentage of states providing lesson plans and tools for evaluating students’ progress. And nationwide there was a 20% increase in districts adopting policies requiring schools to follow national, state, or district PE standards.

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Sink or Swim? How to Produce Annual Improvement

This year the USA Swimming National Championships were held the week of June 25 – 29 in Indianapolis, IN. Many swimmers, some more widely known than others, all put forth their finest effort to try and capture their best performance ever and a chance to compete on the US National Team at the World Championships.

Like many sports, in swimming you can have your top performance but still fall short of beating your opponents. However, you must reach a time standard in order to reach the National Championships in the first place. This established standard is a goal all swimmers can aspire to in their training, when they begin to understand how they measure up across the national swimming spectrum (I wish they had one of these standards for my drop shot). If indeed a swimmer is to consider him/herself an ‘elite’ swimmer, they should be able to set these time standards as goals, and work to improve their times annually in order to accomplish these goals at the peak of their swimming primes.

In 1999 USA Swimming initiated the Olympic Trials Project. This project was established because, “Continued success at the international level is one of the primary goals of USA Swimming. To achieve this goal, it is critical to understand the factors that relate to success in swimming. One means of learning about success is to study the characteristics or qualities of successful individuals; to profile our elite swimmers.”¹

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Physical Education or Recreation

My mom is a leopard, the kind that can’t change her spots. She lives in the moment, says what comes to her mind, and doesn’t look back. It’s history, over and done with. I am my father’s daughter, every sentence measured and every action reflected upon. My reflections often border on rumination, obsessing over the smallest misstatement for hours, days, or even years.

So this article is my latest rumination, more a sharing of questions than an article for information.

Recently, a colleague made a statement to the effect that the majority of physical education teachers are no more than recreation directors. My immediate, uncharacteristically, defensive response was, “I am not a recreation director.” Of course, later, I reflected on the moment and analyzed the statement.

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Preparing for the New School Year

The title of this article is one that could be deceiving until you understand what I mean, and how it should be food for thought. Preparation (for the new school year) should have started many years ago in the college years by acquiring pride in physical education, and the planning it took to become a teacher. As I regress, having retired in 2003, I can look back over many successful years and why they were successful. What made them so extraordinary?

 

 

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NFL Network Physical Education Teacher of the Year

I was fortunate enough to have been named the 2013 NFL Network Physical Education Teacher of the Year. The whole experience was something I will never forget! From filling out initial paperwork, to participating in a phone interview, to actually getting the phone call saying that I had been selected, was a memorable process.

It all started with writing some essays describing my teaching. Writing can be a bit of a hassle, especially in our profession. We don’t often think that there is a place for writing in our work. We are, after all, in the business of creating people that learn to enjoy how to move in ways that benefit them. We strive to teach in a way so that things can make more sense to our students. Just like any other subject, the more you understand the more you learn to enjoy it. By seeing the connections between activities clearly you develop a better understanding! On the surface, writing in class would seem to take away from our primary mission of teaching students to enjoy moving. But there may be a place for it.

One side note on writing. Our district has decided that writing is so important that it should be included in every subject. They describe it as “talking out of the tip of a pen.” To their credit, they did not dictate to us how often and how much writing each subject should include. They basically left it up to us. All they asked is that we look for the best place to include it. Where did it make the most sense to include writing? We were allowed to come up with those answers.

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