PE News and Notes

Welcome back to another school year. I hope everyone had a great summer vacation, I know I enjoyed being with my family. My family has had some firsts over the summer. Not only did new birthdays come around for everyone but also my oldest is now a kindergartener and enjoying every minute of it. For my wife and I the shoe is now on the other foot and now we get to experience all of the things from the parent side.

We have had some new things happen at EKES PE other than a fresh coat of paint on the gym floor and walls. A new tool has been added to the curriculum. EKES now has a low ropes course element added to our adventure activities. This new tool allows fourth and fifth graders the chance to challenge the group’s ability to communicate, trust, and support each other in order to achieve a common goal. The ropes course is located in the inner loop of the nature tail, and I ask that it not be used out of the supervision of myself or someone who has gone through adventure training and OK’d by the school. I ask this because a ropes course even though it is low, it has a lot of safety issues that need to be addressed by the group before it is used.

Another new activity is the recess walker’s club. This is a group of students in grades 1-5 who have decided to walk laps during recess time. They walk a set path on the black top and count their laps. When a student reaches fifty laps they are recorded and the student earns a small plastic shoelace foot. As a group so far they have walked over 63 miles and we have 2 students that have walked over 150 laps. What a great way to stay fit and warm in the coming cold months.

In classes this past month besides the fourth and fifth grades working on the adventure activities, the first to third grades have been working on community building activities as well as spacial awareness activities. Spacial awareness is ones ability to move safely in a given space while avoiding others while staying inside the given boundaries. We are setting the stage to be awesome movers in our play spaces and are ready to begin controlling objects.

I urge parents to stop by the East Kingston web page for another source of information. You can get to the East Kingston page by visiting www.sau16.org I also maintain a page on the site and its address is http://www.eks.sau16.k12.nh.us/pe/ Finally, a new source of information on what’s happening in PE classes. I now have a bulletin board outside the multipose room. Stop by and give it a read. Have a great fall and enjoy our great weather.