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HPE1avatar-2fpv92u.jpgThe HPE Blog is a Physical Education Site designed to connect the students, staff and families of Chris Hadfield Public School…and beyond! Our mission is to keep you informed and up-to-date with our daily student success. Go Astros!

#DesignedToMove Unit

As my previous post highlighted…moving, and moving well is important for our health. In this unit we will be working on our ability to move – hop, skip, jump, land, balance, roll, fall – all important for the all around development of a physically literate student.

You can visit my section oh Physical Literacy for more information on this subject…

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our focus will centre around fun, safe, and basic gymnastic activities. So please stay tuned for examples of the wonderful and creative routines that our students will be creating!

This shows some of the success criteria we will be looking at as we work our way through the unit.

#DesignedToMove

Humans are designed to move. Children, when we let them, love to move. But more than ever kids are not moving. A quick browse of the information on a site like Participaction.com like inform you that kids don’t play as much as they used to for a lot of reasons. One very real barrier to play is the constant lure of screens – video games, television, the internet and smartphones – that has replaced time spent running, playing, and being active.

The Canadian Physical Activity Guidelines for Children and Youth recommend at least 60 minutes of moderate- to vigorous-intensity physical activity every day. Yet only 5 percent of children today are achieving this. The benefits of moving more are amazing! Science has shown that when children increase their daily physical activity, their overall quality of life goes up. They sleep better, have improved academic performance, increased self-esteem and they decrease their chances of developing many diseases such as heart disease and type-2 diabetes. In short, physically active kids are generally healthier and happier.

Powerful videos like the one from designedtomove.org highlight the very real danger of inactivity…this is why our next unit is asking the question – Why Do We Move?

Make It Count!

October sees us starting a month of Personal Fitness and Physical Literacy. Primary students will focus on the fundamentals of fitness – an introduction and review of why we stay healthy, the benefits of an active lifestyle, identifying strengths and challenges, recognizing the signs of exertions, and setting basic goals. Junior students will build on this knowledge and look at fitness in a functional way – more specifically at the different components of fitness, motivating factors, and develop more detailed goals and action plans.

So stay tuned to see how we #makeitcount

Welcome Students & Families!

A warm welcome to all the Chris Hadfield Public School families. I am excited to learn with you in a healthy and active way!

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Please take some time to look around the site. There is lots of information about our curriculum and program that will give you a better understanding as to how we can work as a team to best support your child.

More than ever, it is vital that we get our kids moving! Research shows that active, healthy children performance better with their other subjects. So it is important that we get their body, which is carrying their brain around, moving!

60 minutes a day

Together, we can make Chris Hadfield a healthy and active environment. Looking forward to meeting you…

Bring Back Play in Phys Ed

This is a brief overview of our first unit…and glimpse at to what will be happening in Physical Education throughout September.

In my Program I like to give each month an interesting and meaningful theme that ties into the unit of inquiry. September is all about laying a strong foundation. Together, building the expectations and routines that will allow us to be safe and successful throughout the year.

September will be all about the them of #Bring Back Play. Inspired by the PARTICIPACTION campaign Bring Back Play, I want to kick start my program this year by allowing the students to explore the concept of ‘Play’. What is Play? What skills can we build with Play? Do we get enough Play?

Through play I will design activities that will give the students opportunities to develop the movement skills that will provide them with the competence and confidence to feel the motivation to try new activities and stay more active. The Skills Of The Month for this unit are Running and Dodging, and I will introduce The Passport For Life Program.

We will also teach and reinforce all the important rules and expectations needed for a safe and healthy Phys Ed environment. Together with the students we can explore playground games and cooperative and team-building  tasks that are purposefully designed to help the students pull out the living skills needed for a successful year.

We will practice different stop/start signals and listening skills, game boundaries and rules, the importance of playing fairly, and problem-solving and conflict-resolution skills. Involving the students in the assessment process in variety of ways, such as mind-mapping, exit cards, and self/peer-assessments, makes the learning much more meaningful and visible. Our STARS Class Assessment is an important criteria we will learn so we can develop our active participation in Phys Ed classes.

As we start to work together I will share more of the great work that they students are doing…so stay tuned!

My Four P’s of PE

letter pThis year my Physical Education program will be brought to you by the letter ‘P‘. PlayPhysical LiteracyPedagogy…and Parent Engagement. As the new school year approaches I wanted to organize my thinking as I start planning for the year ahead…

PLAY

Inspired in part by the PARTICIPACTION campaign Bring Back Play, I want to kick start my program this year by allowing the students to explore a unit of inquiry based around ‘Play’. What is Play? What skills can we build with Play? Do we get enough Play?

 

I figure if we want our kids to play more, then who better to advocate for that than the kids themselves! By teaching children about the health benefits of play, the social and emotional skills they can develop, the physical literacy skills they can build, and the brain power they can create, then they will be armed with some pretty good argument when bugging their parents to go to the park! Unless we really engage our families and communities, a couple of periods of “gym” a week simply is not enough.

Nitro-charged advocates of Play, David Kittner (@YouthFitnessGuy) – The Youth Fitness Guy and Kwarme Brown (@drkmbrown) – The Move Theory Guru, do amazing work based around the subject. The ideas they present have pushed me to think deeper and more meaningfully about the power of play within education. I was fortunate enough to attend a workshop with Kwarme at last year’s Physical Literacy Summit in Hamilton. This led to some real self-reflection and re-thinking of my teaching. A practice I recommend for all teachers!

Organizations like Participaction, Active For Life, OPHEA, and CIRA Ontario also offer an abundance of resources to help engage students, parents, and communities with Play.

PHYSICAL LITERACY

LTAD_FMSThrough Play I can design activities that will give students opportunities to develop the fundamental movement skills (FMS) that will provide them with the competence and confidence to feel the motivation to try new activities and stay more active.

During even a simple tag game, we can develop our dodging skills – those quick changes of speed and direction needed for any number of sports – while at the same time practicing our running, skipping, and hopping. We also get the added bonus of developing our spatial and body awareness, not to mention it’s a fun workout!

PHE Canada and the Passport For Life program is a great way to integrate physical literacy into your Physical Education program and fun way to, again, engage the students and their families. Canadian Sport For Life offer extensive resources for assessing physical literacy. The Physical Literacy Assessment for Youth (PLAY) tools, created by Dr. Dean Kriellaars (@DeanKriellaars), are excellent for determining a student’s physical literacy. OPHEA also have an excellent set FMS posters that I regularly use with students when building criteria, self/peer assessing, evaluating, and much more.

PEDAGOGY

hpe logoThe work of a great Physical Educator is to then take that simple tag game, entwine curriculum expectations  and help facilitate student learning. This can be done with clear learning goals, co-created criteria, purposeful questioning and feedback, effective game progressions, visible learning, and meaningful debrief and reflection…all while keeping it fun and active!

Through Play, I can also teach and reinforce all the important rules and expectations needed for a safe and healthy Phys Ed environment. Together with the students we can explore playground games and cooperative and team-building  tasks that are purposefully designed to help the students pull out the living skills needed for a successful year.

With that same tag game we can examine stop/start signals and listening skills, game boundaries and rules, the importance of playing fairly, and problem-solving and conflict-resolution skills. Involving the students in this process in variety of ways, such as mind-mapping, exit cards, and self/peer-assessments, makes the learning much more meaningful and visible. I also recommend embedding these ideas into your daily practice so that you can constantly reinforce the criteria set. My STARS Class Assessment is one way I do this.

Parent and Community Engagement

I am exciting to be opening a new school this year, so have the opportunity to lay the foundations and build a strong program and culture that reaches out beyond the gym walls and into the community.

After initially writing this blog post I happened to then watch Dr. Bob Pangrazi’s keynote at The National PE Institute 2014 Conference. His comment that “if you don’t change things outside of Physed, then you haven’t done anything” got me fired up and inspired to do more!

Many of the resources I have mentioned have great tips and ideas for parents and families about getting active…but I think as Physical Educators, it is our role to support that, expand on that, offer opportunities to learn, and allow your school to be a hub of learning and physical activity.

Thank you for reading…your thoughts and comments are welcomed.

Thank you for the memories Eastbourne…

Thank You EastbourneOver the past five years I have had the honour and pleasure of being the Health and Physical Education Teacher at Eastbourne Drive Public School. It is a wonderful school with many great teachers…and even greater students!

Each year I have pushed them to work hard to overcome their challenges, and it fills me with immense joy and satisfaction to see them achieve great success. To say goodbye to a community I had become so invested in was a difficult moment, but I rest assured that I gave them everything I had.

I believe that children don’t care what you know until they know that you care, and Eastbourne students know that I cared. This coming September I will start a new adventure at Chris Hadfield Public School but will forever hold Eastbourne in my heart.

Thank you for the memories Eastbourne…

Mr. Killeen

 

I like to MOVE It!

Over the past couple of months we have been focusing on how and why we MOVE. It was an interesting question to ask the students, most of them looked at me with blank expressions to begin with or the common an answer was “to exercise!” (perhaps they thought that is what I wanted them to say!?).

Once we began to discuss it more, more practical and creative answers started to flow. Such as “we move to get to the store”, “we have to move to get to our classroom”, and also “we move when we dance”, “I move doing Karate!”.

We agreed that humans are designed to move, and the more we do it, the better we can become at it and the healthier we will be. This is a discussion we could have taken in a million different ways and dug deep into a variety of topics…so many possibilities.

For our unit focus, we honed in on gymnastic type activities for a variety of reasons. 1.The students showed the most interest in this area, 2. These activities allowed us to practice a variety of fundamental skills (i.e., rolling, balancing, jumping and landing) and improve a big chunk of our physical literacy. 3. It allowed students to use their creativity to perform sequences and routines and work collaboratively with other students to achieve this.

With the summative assessment in mind (see videos) of students creating their own movement routines, I scaffolded it in a way so that they could gradually build up their skills but also constantly develop the big idea of what makes a routine successful? Together, we gradually built up our mind-map of what a successful routine would consist of based on the work we had done.

With a nod to another Phys Ed teacher, Mr. Andy Vasily (@andyvasily – http://www.pyppewithandy.com/), I created mini routine templates that focused on a particular skill for each lesson, and students were very engaged in improving that skills and enjoyed the freedom and creativity to put together their own sequence. I supported this each class, with short YouTube clips, quick video/photo feedback of what they were doing, and the results were very impressive!

Once we had built up enough knowledge and practice to be able to tackle creating a routine that combined a variety of skills, we reviewed our mind-map, examined their mini-routines for what worked well, and outlined the criteria for the final performance. Students then had the option to work individually, in pairs, or in groups to create their routine. I provided mats, music, time, and space, and allowed then the freedom to express themselves with movement. Check out some of the routines to see their impressive work!

Once students had designed, practiced, and filmed their routines I had them watch it back and write or commentate a self-reflection. Seeing their performance on the big screen was such a thrill, they were able to highlight areas to improve, celebrate the best parts, and praised their group for excellent work. Overall a great experience for them and for me as a teacher. Lots that liked, but as always, lots I want to improve, tweak, and make even more successful.

Success Criteria for Gymnastics

As we work through our gymnastics work, we will use a variety of criteria that we have built as a class(es) to help guide our learning. Below is an at-a-glance overview…

How I Teach

I was recently featured on The PhysicalEducator.com series ‘How I Teach’. This is a weekly series that highlights a Physical Educator from around the world and gets some insight into their practice. I was honoured and excited to have the chance to share all the fun things I get to do at our school!

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To read the full article, please visit: http://thephysicaleducator.com/blog/files/how-i-teach-steven-killeen.html