This category focuses on how to effectively teach middle school, junior high school, and high schoolers. Learn more about how best to connect with and instruct students who are transitioning from childhood to adulthood, and how to motivate them to be physically active and make healthy lifestyle choices.
Dependent on the world around us, the new school year has been extremely different and challenging for all involved. We all know this. PE at many schools looks very different, my program included.
My instructional setting was fully online for the first quarter and has since shifted to an A/B in-person every other day hybrid model. With that, we only see our students twice a week in person. It’s been a trying process to create a PE program that is fun and effective for all students regardless of their living situations. It’s also been a constant battle with the at school restrictions, notably, trying to build effective and comprehensive activities while students are masked and cannot dress down with the locker rooms off-limits.
I’m the “tech mentor” in my school. The responsibility of a tech mentor includes providing professional development to staff members, supporting teachers with technology in their classrooms and setting technology up for special events.
A few months ago I was invited to help review a middle school PE program. It wasn’t what I expected. I soon learned that some of America’s richest and best-known families pay a hefty sum to send their kids to this private school. I was intrigued to understand why. And it soon became apparent. The culture of the school was not what I expected.
The 3rd Annual Dr. Bob Frederick Sport Leadership Lecture Series took place on the campus of Lewis-Clark State College this past October. I started the series in 2013 to help students gain insight from leaders in the sport industry, and provide a glimpse into the number of career opportunities available to them. In three years, 44 presenters from sport-related fields including: interscholastic sport, intercollegiate sport, professional sport, collegiate sport recreation, municipal recreation, education, outdoor recreation, sport business, and sport governance, have kindly given their time and knowledge to the series.
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.
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.
