The Best Parts of My Week....4/25/11-4/29/11

Hi everyone,

Last week we enjoyed Spring Recess and students and teachers came back to school energized for the rest of the year! I hope you enjoy the "Best Parts of My Week"!

.....Well, the ladies in the office at my school have outdone themselves again! Honestly, they are wonderful and so involved with our students and our programs! They volunteered to take care of Fitness Frankie during Spring Recess and made another awesome book with pictures and a story about his adventures with them! We are so fortunate to have them both in our building! Check out the story and some pictures by visiting Fitness Frankie's Blog!

.....During the day on Monday, I frequently asked my students about their Spring Recess. I wanted to know if they had been active and if they enjoyed their time off from school. I had some great conversations. At the end of the day, while I was on bus duty in the hallway, one of my fourth grade students was kind enough to ask me about my vacation!

.....I was on bus duty in the hallway on Monday afternoon when our health teacher came to tell me that when she discussed nutrition with some of our classes and told them that a tomato was a vegetable, many corrected her by saying "Mrs. R. said that it is a fruit!" We then had a great discussion about how the controversy over whether a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable. She was impressed that the food pyramid and nutrition was covered in PE class! I was impressed that my students remembered! I guess they were paying attention!

.....While introducing a Dance unit in my primary grades, I told the students that dancing is terrific exercise and I was going to prove it to them by using my pedometer to show them how many steps we took during each dance. My older students use pedometers regularly, but students in the younger grades have not yet used them during PE class. It was fun to show them the step counts at the end of each dance. They were excited to know how many steps we took for each dance and agreed that dancing is great exercise!

.....As I have said, my primary students have been enjoying some dancing recently. I learned a dance from a colleague many years ago called "The Paper Dance". Each student has a piece of paper on the floor in front of them (I use scrap paper and recycle it), and they follow me as I do basic dance steps on, off, and with the paper. One of the steps is called the "Cool Walk". I tell my students that they are the coolest students in the world and I want them to show me by doing the "Cool Walk" around their piece of paper on the floor. We practice and then during the music we all do it when I say "Do the Cool Walk"! I always smile and enjoy this dance because the "Cool Walks" that the students come up with are fantastic! They are totally cool!

.....One of my fourth grade classes was going to miss PE class one day this week because of a visitor to their classroom. This guest is an expert on Colonial America and comes each year to teach our students in a unique and engaging way. I went down to the class to watch his presentation during their scheduled PE time. He was terrific! The students were very excited and involved in the lesson. The timing was perfect because he was just about to teach the students about games that were played by children in Colonial America! I learned all about the games from that era. One of the games was a wooden version of something we use in PE today called a "Catch-A-Cup"! The Colonial game was much harder!

.....I am always looking to try new things and I saw a game in a new book that bought recently (PE 2 the Max by J.D. Hughes) called "Scooter Blitz". Sometimes games look good on paper, but need to be modified for your own space and students so I decided to try it out with one of my 5th grade classes. I told them that they were going to be my "test class", since I had not played the game before and I wanted to see how it worked. They were terrific! The game was great and they all seemed to enjoy it! At the end of class I asked them for feedback about what they liked about the game and ideas they had for variations. They came up with wonderful suggestions and seemed proud to be the "test class"! I was proud of them too!

.....I can't believe that April has ended and today is May 1st! During May we participate in a project that I call "Operation Healthy North Park". This is our 10th year of the program! It is a program that encourages students, staff, family members, and community members to exercise outside of the school day as part of National Physical Education and Sport Week which we extend to to the entire month of May. I had a great time getting ready for this project this past week. I put up a bulletin board that displays the project and enjoyed the interest that it generated! This year I have modified the program to include our Healthy Highway theme! Visit the North Park PE Website to see a picture of last year's project and to view information about the project. Everyone is invited to participate! If you would like to get involved, download the letter and "Coop" cars and e-mail me your activities!

.....We held our most recent Healthy Highway assembly this past Friday morning. We will be driving on "Success Circle" this month. It was a great assembly! We celebrated our many different student successes and talked about what success means from the viewpoints of character education, physical education and fitness, and nutrition. We had a great time!

.....Friday was an early release day due to parent/teacher conferences. I had a visit from a former student who is now in different elementary school. It was a great visit! It is so heartwarming to know that you have made a connection that continues even after students are no longer in your school..........

I hope you enjoyed reading about "The Best Parts of My Week".

Please consider participating in "Operation Healthy North Park!"

Visit the North Park PE website to learn more about our program.

E-mail me with comments or questions at: northparkpe@yahoo.com