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.
It’s a good idea to move the location of your hand-holds periodically to keep the climbing wall interesting and challenging for climbers over time. In doing so, you can create specific climbing routes, of varying difficulty levels, for climbers to try.
What Is a Climbing Route? A climbing route is a specific path the climber must follow to reach the top, or end, of a climb.
How Are Climbing Routes Marked? Routes can be marked with tape next to holds that are on the route. Or the same color hand-hold can be used throughout a route. Many climbing walls include color-coded hand-holds which makes it easier to set routes by color. Each color corresponds to a certain difficulty level enabling route setters to set climbing routes of varying degrees of challenge.
When you think back to your elementary school years, what do you remember most? I remember the field days that left me both exhausted and also with the feeling that I just had the best day of the year. All of this was because my physical education teacher put in a lot of hard work and extra time to plan this special day.
Here are some tips on how to organize an unforgettable field day experience for your students:
Physical educators and adapted physical educators have stepped up these past few months to make sure their students had opportunities to continue, as best they could, with the physical education curriculum during the COVID-19 pandemic. For a majority of teachers, lessons were designed with the premise that students would not have much, if any, of the traditional equipment often used in physical education or adapted physical education settings.
(U.S. Air Force photo/Capt. Brittany Martin)
The purpose of this article is three-fold:
To encourage and support physical educators and adapted physical educators to use our recipes to make some homemade equipment with the intent to get this equipment in the hands of their students for their fall classes. We do realize that to complete some of our equipment recipes; there will be costs involved. Perhaps some of the physical education or adapted physical education equipment budget for 2020-2021 could be used to purchase the materials to make the equipment; or possibly, funds for materials could be obtained through Donor’s Choose or other similar programs that fund school projects.
To encourage teachers to pass these recipes along to families or other community members who want to support the physical education and adapted physical education programs, by either making the equipment or donating the materials so the teachers could make the equipment in preparation for classes.
To provide several activities that the physical educators and adapted physical educators could have the students do with their distance learning equipment. We would also encourage the teachers to keep abreast of the numerous resources that have been posted on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.) that might also provide equipment ideas that would be simple, easy, and cost-effective to make this summer so that their students might be able to work toward mastery of additional physical education content in their fall classes.
In sum, the goal is to provide equipment recipes and corresponding activities to support physical educators and adapted physical educators to design distance learning activities for their students that will still meet the physical education national/state grade-level outcomes. Thus, providing our students with meaningful, yet fun opportunities to master grade-level outcomes – even in the chaos of a pandemic.
Research has informed us that schools that embrace the whole child establish a foundation for academic success, improved school attendance, and a decline in disruptive behaviors among students. These gains are made possible with a specific focus on the unique role that quality skills-based health education and physical education play in a school setting.
It is a very exciting time in health and physical education. After decades of trying to find our place in the educational landscape as a subject area that has been marginalized as a “special” or a “related art,” we are now taking our seat at the table as genuine contributors to our most critical educational questions. One such question is, “How do schools embrace the whole child while maintaining academic rigor and results?” Many believe there are times when we must sacrifice one for the other and that is simply untrue. A commitment to social and emotional learning comes with the understanding that we teach children before content — in all grade levels, at all times.
(Photo by Staff Sgt. Jason Colbert)
A New Era The coronavirus pandemic has catapulted us to a moment in our history that will forever define the way we approach education. What we’ve learned, unequivocally, is that to nurture the social-emotional needs and mental health of school-aged children will be critical as we move into what will be the new normal for our nation’s schools. As we struggle with traditional conversations around later start times for high schools, less or no homework, responsive classrooms, restorative practices, additional counselors, and other academic supports, it is imperative that we remain loyal to what is happening on the inside of each child. The physical and mental health of each student will be at the forefront of learning. It has been and will be, as critical to their academic success as any other instructional activity happening in our schools.
We have made great progress as a society in helping students with special needs feel included. But we can do more. We must constantly assess our culture (i.e. attitude and beliefs about students with special needs), existing policies, and procedures to make sure we are doing our very best for our students.
We must challenge ourselves to do all we can to make our students with special needs feel valuable, included and equal. We must advocate for our students with disabilities to ensure that they have the very best school experience we can provide academically, socially, emotionally, and physically. Lately, I have been reflecting on the way I give praise and to whom I praise. The other day I called a parent of a typical student. The purpose of the phone call was to let the parents know how proud I was of their child for the gentle way they guided a student with special needs into the partner yoga poses. The typical child deserved every bit of praise because of her nurturing and patient ways. However, it got me thinking. How many times do I praise the typical child for all the love, support, and help they give to my students with special needs as opposed to the number of times I praise my students with special needs for their patience, help, and encouragement of my typical students?
I grew up a three-sport athlete, but I always had a love of outdoor recreation – especially rafting, mountain biking, and snowboarding. Unfortunately, with a limited income and the time constraints associated with being a college student, it was hard to get away for extended periods of time to do these activities.
Photo Credit: Santeri Viinamäki
When I first played disc golf, I was surprised to find out how inexpensive the game was. Then I was amazed at how much it was like one of my favorite games – golf. All of my favorite aspects of golf were present in disc golf, such as frustration tolerance, scoring, physical exertion, social engagement, appreciation for nature, and etiquette. As time passed, I became fully entranced by the game and decided to pursue a doctorate studying the elusive counter-culture of disc golf.
Photo Credit: Crosslap (pixabay.com)
While disc golf may be a relatively unfamiliar sport to the general public, the Professional Disc Golf Association (PDGA) estimates 500,000 people play annually, and as many as eight to twelve million people have played disc golf at some point in their lives (PDGA, 2018). Although research on disc golf is limited, public disc golf courses are perpetually full of recreation enthusiasts, leading me to wonder, “Why didn’t I hear about this game sooner?” and “Why wasn’t this taught in physical education classes?”
Photo credit: Kevin Morrow
There are few sports where people can remain competitive well into old age, but disc golf is a sport where players, such as the 2016 Master’s World Champion, John E. McCray (48 years old), can compete and win against younger athletes (Latitude 64, 2020). Like golf, disc golf is a sport for people of nearly all physical and cognitive abilities and is considered a low-impact lifetime leisure activity (Tuten & Conkell, 1999) that is typically free to play, since over 90% of courses exist in public parks (Oldakowski & McEwen, 2013). Disc golf can be played by a single person for independent mastery or played as a competitive multiple participant sport where players attempt to score lower (fewer strokes) than their fellow competitors.
Do you remember Show and Tell events when you were in elementary school? More than likely you brought a special object to school and showed your classmates how it worked or what was unique about it. Maybe you explained a bit of history about your particular item or why it was important to you.
From an educational standpoint, the purpose of Show and Tell was to help children developed their public speaking skills. The concept of Show and Tell can be also be applied to teaching and coaching when using demonstrations during a lesson or practice. There has been a wealth of motor learning research over the years on the use and value of demonstrations (show) and verbal instructions (tell) to facilitate learning a new task (Magill and Anderson, 2017; Schmidt and Lee, 2014; SHAPE America 2014; Wulf, 2013). When embracing the Social Learning Theory framework, demonstrating a skill or task creates a mental image that students can identify with as they attempt to reproduce the movement or activity (Magill & Anderson, 2017). The concept, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” emphasizes the importance of demonstrating skill techniques and activities when teaching and coaching. Adding verbal instruction, along with a demonstration, further helps students assimilate the task being taught.
It has been my experience that teacher preparation candidates find it much easier to use verbal explanations than demonstrations during instruction. In fact, they are really good at telling. Students in teacher/coach preparation programs often have acquired a high level of content knowledge, especially in those sports or activities they have played. As such, they tend to explain everything they know when teaching a skill. The overload of information provided becomes too much for learners to effectively process and remember. Plus, excessive talking during the explanation takes up too much time within a lesson or practice and reduces the amount of time available for practice and play opportunities.
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