Category: Adapted PE

Physical education and health education classes should be designed to benefit all children regardless of their abilities. Writers share information within the Adapted category about different types of disabilities and how teachers can create learning experiences appropriate for all learning levels.

Follow this category. New to RSS?

Start Your School Year with a Little SEL in Adapted PE

The intentional practice of teaching social emotional learning (SEL) in physical education is not a new concept. In the past five years, numerous articles have been published in the Journal of Physical Education, Recreation, and Dance (JOPERD) and Strategies on the topics of SEL, cooperative learning, and the affective domain. Each article provides basic information about the topics and offers strategies and activities physical educators could do with their students to ultimately focus on a positive school climate.

tug_of_war

Additionally, SHAPE America facilitated a two-day conference (Exploring the mind-body connection: Social and emotional learning in HPE) in July 2019. This conference was packed with 75 sessions addressing a variety of SEL topics, providing general physical educators (GPE), adapted physical educators (APE), and health educators (HE) with content and hands-on opportunities to engage with colleagues on a variety of SEL concepts (Table 1).  One of the goals of the conference was to help attendees intentionally include SEL concepts in classes for the upcoming school year.

Table 1: SHAPE America Two-Day Conference on Social and Emotional Learning in HPE

Read More

Movement and Mindful Hallways: Creating a Culture of Movement

I have been teaching for about 18 years now and have observed many students struggle with focus and inattentiveness. In addition, my own son struggles with ADHD and motor tics, (there are times when he appears to want to dance out of his own skin). To assist him, my husband and I purchased a mini-trampoline, spinning chair, ninja line, door swing, and more. Our intent was to give him breaks to move during homework and studying to help him focus and attend.

There are many students like my son in our classrooms. I’m convinced that we do not provide our students sufficient opportunities to move throughout the day due to increased academic demands, testing, etc. Our society is becoming more sedentary with the increase of technology and video games. Students are not getting the daily Physical Education they need. And too many teachers pull students out of PE classes to catch up on work they have not completed.

It especially frustrates me when recess time is taken away to do “bonus work” in the classroom. Our children are already not being given enough opportunities to gain the sensory input they need for learning! We urgently need to address this. When a child’s need to move goes unfilled, it can translate into inattentiveness, lack of drive, and impulsivity. We need to provide them with many varied opportunities to succeed and to move.

Read More

2019 National PE & School Sport Institute News

FROM THE FOUNDER: First of all, I would like to thank the thousands of K-12 physical education teachers who have attended the institute in the past. Our upcoming gathering is expected to be the “Place To Be” for 500+ physical education leaders and experts from over 37 different states and 11 different countries. I also want to mention that we have decided to “close our doors” after 2020. In other words, this year (2019) and next year (2020) will be the last two events our company will host.  It has been the pleasure of our family to serve each of you during this time. Thanks for your support!
 

THIS YEAR’S EVENT: The 2019 National Physical Education & School Sport Institute will take place on Monday July 22 through Wednesday July 24, 2019 in Asheville, North Carolina. This is the 8th annual gathering dedicated to providing the ultimate learning and networking opportunity for #PEGeeks across the United States and around the world.

Read More

Healthy Choices to Starting the School Day

Student lives are packed with school, homework, entertainment, social media and much more. This leaves little time for healthy eating and exercising. Understanding how to fit healthy meals and exercise into busy school days affects the ability of our students to meet the high demands of a busy life while simultaneously maintaining short and long-term health. Physical activity, good nutrition, and a healthy mind set, build the foundation for a well-rounded childhood. Questions about whether or not to eat breakfast, what to eat for breakfast, when to exercise, and how many hours of sleep are needed, are often confusing topics with many differing opinions. In this article, we address some common topics relating to how to start the day based on research-proven strategies for dealing with the fast-paced environment in which today’s students live.

Habits
Habits are regular tendencies and practices followed with little conscious effort. Habits are born out of long-term consistent routines. The more consistent students are with sleeping, eating right, and exercising, the greater likelihood they will become habits. Although changing our daily lifestyles can be difficult, one effective strategy is to set the goal of practicing 3-4 new behaviors for 30 days. These new goals should be written down and read daily. After 30 days students often discover that the new behaviors are taking less effort and starting to become second nature “habits.” But remember, it’s important to ensure routines (e.g. to eat breakfast everyday) are also consistently healthy (i.e. include meals that are well-balanced). Because lifelong habits can good or bad for your well-being, it’s vital our students’ choices are good!

Have Plenty of Choices
School-age children often don’t like doing the same thing over and over again. Routines that don’t include variety can become boring. But including variety doesn’t have to take away from the goal of developing consistent habits, but rather emphasizes the importance of providing choices within behaviors. Students need to have plenty of healthy choices for food and different options for staying physically active. Mixing it up is fun, refreshing, and something to look forward to doing rather than disliking.

Read More

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)

 

Read More

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:

Read More