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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Using “Escape Rooms” in PE

Escape Rooms are becoming more and more popular among today’s youth and are a great way to get students’ adrenaline pumping.They consist of adventure type games in which players solve a series of puzzles, mazes, and riddles using clues, hints, and strategy to achieve specified goals. If you’ve tried one you may have thought, wow, my students would LOVE this! I know I did. But how can we integrate this concept to benefit our students in Physical Education and Health?

I absolutely LOVE creating Physical Education games, activities, and assessments that integrate health, fitness, wellness, and nutrition concepts. I want my students to break into not just a physical sweat but a mental sweat as well. As a PE teacher, it is a constant challenge to fit everything I want the students to learn into a 40-minute class that meets twice a week. I need to make every PE second count. That being said, Escape Room/ Break out games in PE are the perfect tool.

You walk into the gym and see Buff Bobby Bones in pieces.  He has been playing a lot of Fort Night, has not been exercising or eating a balanced diet, and his bones became too weak and fell apart. We have to help put Buff Bobby Bones back together again and figure out the antidote to make sure his bones stay together and strong in the future. Hurry, or else Buff Bobby Bones will never be strong again…

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Adventure Education Class Creates Path Toward 50 Million Strong Success

SHAPE America’s 50 Million Strong by 2029 commitment has a very clear vision: To get all of America’s school-aged youth physically active and healthy by the year 2029. Less clear, is how America’s physical and health educators can successfully accomplish such a challenging mission. But what many teachers have recognized is that a workable approach is to accept that “it starts with me.” While individual teachers don’t control what happens outside of their school, they do control what they choose to do and choose not to do with their own students. What follows is a description of how one teacher is attempting to change the way that his students think about and approach physical activity.

Not long ago, Peter Toutenhoofd – Mr. T. as he is known to his students – a physical educator from South High, Sheboygan, WI received a PEP Grant. He asked himself, “How might my students best benefit from this funding?” Mr. T decided to take a non-traditional approach and to create an Adventure Education program. Here’s what he did:

Students were first given a formal definition of Adventure Education and then asked to rewrite it into their own words. This process allowed Mr. T to check for understanding and ensure teacher and students were thinking similarly. Next a “Full Value Contract” (FVC) involving PEEP (physical, emotional, environment, and personal elements) was explained and students were challenged to design one they could all agree to for the class. Once this FVC was written and modified, all participants were required to sign it. Some of the key elements in the contract included the following:

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50 Million Strong by 2029: Tracking Progress Toward Achieving Our Goal (2018 Update)

What was described in my previous post was step one of the assessment plan presented at the 50 Million Strong Forum at the SHAPE America Convention in Boston 2017.  Step one involved the use of nationally available high school and middle school level data to track our 50 Million Strong progress and guide our actions. In addition to the discussed behaviors addressed in YRBS and policies addressed by SHHPS and SHAPE of the Nation, teachers must be able to assess the national health and physical education content standards.   Students must learn the skills, knowledge, competence and desire to be physically active and make healthy choices and so we need to track program success in the national standards.  To this end there is a need for additional assessments teachers can use that showcase student mastery of key knowledge, and skills.  These are being developed by additional task forces. A brief overview is given below.

Assessment Rationale for use Examples
NATIONAL SURVEILLANCE MEASURES

National surveillance measures of health behaviors (mostly self report), state and national policy (selected items from YRBS, SHAPE of the Nation, SHHPS)

 

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50 Million Strong by 2029: Tracking Progress Toward Achieving Our Goal

(Publisher’s Note: This article is based on a presentation made by the author as part of the 50 Million Strong by 2029 Forum held at the 2017 SHAPE America National Convention.)

 In 2016, SHAPE America made a commitment to ensure that by 2029 all of America’s youth will be “empowered to live healthy and active lives through effective health and physical education programs” (SHAPE America 2016).  Since then, many people have asked how will we ensure that we are making progress toward this goal, or how and when will we know if we have achieved it? To this end, SHAPE America President Steve Jefferies appointed a Measurement Advisory Panel tasked with wrestling with these issues and identifying how we should begin to measure progress.

The Advisory Panel included the following professionals:

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Conquering the Creativity Challenge

Have you every observed a great activity or lesson and thought, “Wow, what a great idea! My students would LOVE that!”? Then, shortly after, you hear that annoying inner voice in your head whisper “Too bad I’m not creative.” Well, it is time to challenge that inner voice to stop thinking so negatively and work with you here! Seriously, if that inner voice was one of my friends we would not be spending a whole lot of quality time together!

What makes a “creative person”? Is it a gift from God? Are you born that way? Is it a learned behavior? Is it a sign of genius or a sign of madness!?

Creativity is a phenomenon whereby something new and somehow valuable is formed.That being said, everyone can be creative! We teach our students that belief in themselves is the first step to achieving any goal. Let’s take our own advice and believe we can be just as creative as that teacher or speaker who amazed us! By changing our mindset, we can foster creativity!

Here are fifteen ways that I find help me to get my creative juices flowing. Try one (or all) and see where your creativity takes you.

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50 Million Strong by 2029:  Create a Healthy School Community

Why and how should physical education and health teachers reach beyond class time and units to become change-makers to create a healthier school community?

We know that children attend school during the most formative years of their lives. These are the years when habits and preferences develop that often continue into adult life. Therefore, schools are a perfect place for teachers, as well as students, to impact future behaviors. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, three-week nutrition or fitness units are too short to make long-lasting differences. To make 50 Million Strong a reality, we need to integrate health and wellness into our school communities throughout the year.

In 2008, Collegiate School in Richmond, Virginia, started its Link It & Live It wellness program to inspire and empower students, employees and parents to make healthful choices. Link It & Live It provides opportunities, activities and events for the school community to take ownership for present and future wellness throughout the year. The program focuses on the link between sleep, healthful eating and physical activity, and how together they impact the heart, brain and body.

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50 Million Strong by 2029: Making Your Case by Creating a Targeted Argument to Achieve #SHAPE50Million

Engaging all of the nation’s youth in physical activity and guiding them toward lives in which they are enthusiastically committed to choosing healthy lifestyles is no small feat. SHAPE America’s 50 Million Strong by 2029 commitment seeks to accomplish this through the work of America’s many thousands of health and physical educators. However, the state of health and physical education in US schools remains challenging (SHAPE America, 2016). Many States are cutting or providing waivers for time required for quality health and physical education. Additionally, many have not established policy for children to be active before, during, and after school (SHAPE America, 2016).

In the 2016 Shape of the Nation it was reported that, “although effective physical education and physical activity programs are essential in the formative growth of children, there is a large disparity in state requirements and implementation, affecting children’s abilities to engage in and benefit from these programs” (Shape of the Nation, 2016, p. 4). Given the current status of physical education in America’s schools, for SHAPE America’s ambitious 50 Million Strong commitment to succeed, effective advocacy for quality physical and health education and increased physical activity time in schools is vital.

To create quality and effective health and physical education programs across all schools throughout the nation in the 21st century is clearly going to be a monumental task. And it’s going to be especially difficult in schools where principals and teachers feel pressured to provide as much core content time as possible so that students pass standardized tests. However, it may be possible for physical and health educators and promotors of physical activity to help schools advance their academic mission while simultaneously implementing their own quality programs. But to do this, teachers will need to be equipped with the appropriate information and data in order to craft the right “pitch” to stakeholders.

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