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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Teaching Braille in PE

Each school year, I teach a unit called “Abilities Awareness.” Making students aware of each other’s different abilities helps us become better citizens and leads to a more positive and inclusive school climate. This awareness leads to empathy and a deeper understanding of our peers’ individual learning needs resulting in the sense of belonging, community, and value in our school community. This unit is also an opportunity to address misconceptions surrounding different disabilities. In the words of Winston Churchill, “Diversity is the one true thing we all have in common. Celebrate it every day.”

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Sight Reading Braille
This year, I wanted to introduce my students to the basics of the Braille alphabet. First, my student teacher, Tyler Villez, and I gave the student’s background information on Louis Braille and how he invented a form of written language for people with vision impairments, called Braille. We explained to them that Braille was a written language in which characters are represented by patterns of raised dots felt with the fingertips. Our students learned that Braille, as well as enlarged print and audio, was how vision-impaired students accessed instructional materials in school.

We first taught our students how to read the Braille alphabet by sight through a fun Braille scavenger hunt game. The “Fitness Braille Alphabet” posters I used in the game can be found here. https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Braille-Alphabet-Fitness-9261345. We placed all 26 Braille alphabet posters on cones and scattered them around the gym.

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Coding Pathways with Ozobots in PE

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I love finding creative ways to incorporate S.T.E.A.M into Physical Education. S.T.E.A.M stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math. I was at my daughter’s Open House for her enrichment class in Bayport where she was showing me how her class was using Ozobots to practice coding.  I was immediately intrigued by these little coding robots. I immediately noticed how the students’ faces lit up with excitement as they explained to their parents all the functions you could perform with them. Immediately I thought: what if we combine fitness activities with coding? What a great way to relate to the student’s interests and get them excited about fitness!

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If you are not familiar with Ozobots, they are little robots with sensors that allow you to program behaviors you want the Ozobots to perform. Ozobots move by detecting the color of the line underneath it. They follow lines using a back-and-forth motion. The Ozobots also detect a combination of colors which are programmed for more complex commands such as “turn around,” “turbo speed,” “backward walk,” etc. Check here for more info on Ozobots.

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Show and Tell: A Teaching Strategy

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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Caring for Space

It has become wildly apparent that neglect leads to destruction.  The planet, the houseless, bodies, trauma, young people.  ( I could add the elderly or just ‘people’ there as well, but older people tend to have and want to keep, and don’t want upheaval to complicate things.  They also typically don’t have the energy.)  When I returned from my two-month leave, the storage closet and mat room were in shambles.  Two of my female students told me how they organized the equipment closet for me, then found it a mess the next day.  They cleaned it again and found it a mess again.  As I listened to their story, I playfully asked, “And then what happened?”  We just gave up.  I smiled, thanked them for their efforts, and said, “Welcome to [Physical] Education.”

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I get to school early, at least an hour before our directed 7:30 am start time.  I need time for myself, to move and notice the left conditions of things.  The starting point is never the same.  Not with my body, not with the environment.  There is a system of inspections that takes place.  We make continuous, sincere checks on that which we care about.  What is the current condition, what resources do we have to either solve or investigate the problem, and what conflicts are at play for maintaining order and ownership?

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Snow Much Fun!

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With winter and cold weather upon us, children’s play is often limited to the indoors both at home and in school. By the time the kids get home from school and finish homework, it is already getting dark, so outside playtime is limited. Plus, add lack of motivation to play in frigid temperatures to the list that limits outdoor play. Let’s not forget that most school districts do not allow students outside for recess if the temperature drops below a certain temperature. Don’t forget to add the pandemic to the list. Winter weather plus the pandemic equals not a lot of opportunities for students to get outside with friends and play.

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As a way to change this and welcome the winter season,  I have found some opportunities for our students to get outside more and play in the snow. Playing in the snow allows children to just be children and explore a world of endless opportunities. They can create artwork, build structures, create a dream world full of snow people, animals, and creatures. They can allow their imagination to soar. Snow is a blank canvas with an endless world of opportunities only limited by your imagination. Plus, if dressed appropriately, have you ever seen someone look unhappy in the snow? Even with adults, you can see the twinkle in their eyes and the mischief in their faces as they resort to being a kid again. Playing in the snow is one of the childhood memories, (and adult memories) that will be with them the rest of their lives.

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Hard Questions About Teaching Physical Education

What is Physical Education’s Purpose?

I am neither a philosopher nor a sociologist, but the four rationales I commonly hear for physical education are:

Physical education has intrinsic value
Here physical education is valued as a fundamental form of human behavior -play, for its ability to create what in its simplest form might be described as the joy of moving. Play either as childhood play (e.g., spontaneous and invented games) or as organized and formal adult play (e.g., sports, dance, yoga). If physical education is rationalized in terms of intrinsic value the primary outcomes for teaching become turning kids on to moving, or what Siedentop (1980) called approach tendencies towards physical education, that is, a student’s willingness to engage in the content. This willingness is the result of a history of positive experiences with the content of physical education. Such a history requires that students are competent performers in the content. This can be contrasted with roll-out-the-ball approaches that cannot sustain joy-of-movement as an outcome because students fail to become competent.

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(Editor’s Note: Originally published in PHE America April 1, 2014)

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Universal Design for Learning in Physical Education

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UDL is a way of thinking and acting that may change the way you approach student learning. Rather than thinking a student needs to change, UDL looks at the learning environment. Consider what within the environment is a barrier to learning. Is it that space itself? Is it the equipment you are using? Perhaps it is the way the students are expected to learn. The learning environment can include other barriers such as the goals of the class, the way assessments are conducted, or the way the students are organized. See below for a diagram that outlines an ecological analysis of the learning environment (Haywood & Getchell, 2019). When considering implementing UDL in the classroom, it is important to look at the following elements.

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UDL provides a framework for implementing strategies to reduce barriers to student learning. The main way to do this is to create a learning environment where students have what they need to flexibly meet the learning goals. When developing and planning your lesson, think about the students, the classroom environment, and the task you are teaching.

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