PHYSICAL EDUCATION

As the holiday season rapidly approaches the children are learning a lot and having fun in each gym class.  In Pre-K I am having the children work on space awareness games and hand-eye coordination.  Space awareness games help the children learn about their surrounding and how to work in their own space.  To improve hand-eye coordination Pre-K is using softball size bouncy balls to throw and catch in a variety of ways.  In kindergarten through 2nd grade the children are also participating in space awareness games including a variety of tag games.  Kindergarten -2nd have also been doing many different activities with the parachute.  In all of the younger grades we are also practicing jump roping in preparation for Jump Rope for Heart which will be coming up in the spring.

In 3rd grade through 7th grade we have just concluded our unit in volleyball where we spend three weeks learning different skills.  The skills that we learned were how to serve, how to bump the ball, and how to set the ball.  In the upcoming weeks we will be playing a variety of team oriented games and activities.  These games/activities will stress the importance of working together as a team and how that helps in the success of a game or activity. The 8th grade class has just finished a “Minute to Win It” Project.  The class was split up into groups of three and each group had to pick a Minute to Win It game and create a PowerPoint presentation and present the game to the class.  Each group then got a chance to show the class how the game works and to see if they could successfully complete the task.  In the upcoming semester each group of 8th graders will go into a classroom (grades 3-7) and present their PowerPoint and game to the class that they are assigned.  Following the presentation each member of the class will get to try the game and see if they can succeed.