On any day of the week, Kathy Delaney’s kindergarten through 2nd grade physical education classes at Grand Prairie School in Frankfort might be playing with bean bags, balloons, feathers or scarves. They might be bouncing a beach ball or throwing a tennis ball. Whatever they are working with, there will be music and time for them to explore ways to play on their own.
“With a Hula-Hoop, we would begin with spinning it around the waist, showing them how it has to touch their back to start. Then jump the hoop, holding it on top and turning it so it goes under their feet, over their head, forward, backward. They would finger spin it, hold it out in front and use their fine motor control to move it with their fingers around in a circle. Reverse. Do it with the other hand,” says Delaney, who has been teaching for 18 years.
With each piece of equipment, Delaney’s students develop hand-eye coordination, balance, fine and gross motor skills. They learn to follow directions and to be creative.
“It’s an attitude. There is no failure in this kind of program. They all succeed,” according to Delaney, who sees her students for 30 minutes, five days a week. “This is our second year seeing them five days instead of twice a week and it has been a major positive change,” said Delaney. “There is carry-over from the day before. I don’t have to say, `Remember what we did last Thursday?’ “
As physical education curriculums try to tackle the problem of making physical activity a lifelong, everyday part of people’s lives, Kathryn Wiggins, associate professor in the School of Education at DePaul University, has seen physical education become expanded and enhanced in important ways.
“Team sports used to pretty much dominate gym programs. They would teach five team sports a year and that’s it. And if you didn’t like team sports — tough,” Wiggins says.
Just ask Paula Wagner, 42, of Evanston. For Wagner, gym class was “about competition, and I wasn’t competitive.” Because she wasn’t good at team sports, she felt like an outsider.
“The class was not a lot of fun unless you were good. The teams would always be unbalanced, with the kids choosing up their own (players).”
But for Wagner’s daughter, Emily a 16-year-old junior at Evanston Township High School, where students have physical education 43 minutes a day for four years, gym class is about teamwork.
Emily is part of an adventure education class. This type of class is popping up in high schools throughout the Chicago area, including Lane Tech on the Northwest Side and Niles North in Skokie. This physical education elective offers students the chance to scuba dive, canoe, camp out, rock climb, learn circus arts, swing on ropes suspended 20 feet above the gym floor, shoot arrows and even learn how to tie knots.
“Adventure ed is about cooperation rather than competition,” said John Brinkworth, chairman of Evanston’s physical education department. Brinkworth worked with Chester Jones, a physical education teacher and gymnastics coach at Evanston, for six years to bring the innovative physical education program to their high school.
The first few days of the adventure ed class, according to Emily, who took the class last fall, “we spent playing games to learn each other’s names — they were actually fun.”
Students begin with games that have them falling backward and being caught by their team. “We build trust. There’s not a whole lot of trust in the world anymore,” Jones said. “It’s hard to trust somebody you don’t know. So we build very gradually until we get a student up on the rope obstacle course (suspended from the ceiling) and she’s got four or five people down on the ground holding her on the end of a rope — she trusts them with her life.”
Because the whole team is needed to work the course, students depend on each other to not miss class. If two students are absent, the team can’t participate.
“We all encouraged each other to come,” Emily said. “We’d say, `We’re grounded if you don’t come.’ I don’t remember my team ever being grounded.”
“It not just something they take for a semester and forget about,” according to Jones. After the camping trip, several students were confident enough in their new-found skills to purchase camping equipment and camp on their own the following weekend.
“We get more and more of that every year. Some like the climbing part so much they join a health club with a climbing wall,” Jones said. “I met one of the students packing Christmas trees for Franks. He said, `Mr. Jones, it sure was nice to learn how to tie knots.’ “
More than 60 percent of adults in the United States do not engage in enough regular physical activity, according to the Surgeon General’s Report on Physical Activity and Health, published in 1999. A quarter of adults are not active at all. The picture for children and adolescents is not much better. Almost half of young people aged 12 to 20 and more than a third of high school students do not participate in vigorous physical activity on a regular basis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Guidelines for School and Community Programs Promoting Lifelong Physical Activity.
Physical education class may be the only time during the day that some children are active.
“The impetus for putting required physical education into schools was World War I and II soldiers flunking physical fitness tests. We had an awful lot of people who weren’t eligible to fight our wars,” according to Wiggins. “In the old days, (the attitude) was, `I don’t care what you think or how you feel, get down and do those pushups. Run the laps.’ But generally in our society, the definition of health has been enhanced and expanded. Our new goals all have to do with holistic wellness — understanding how your body performs and moves appropriately, so that you prevent injury; understanding how the body functions so you can be a healthy person. It’s not teaching kids how to play a game; it’s meant to teach them how to live a fulfilling life as an adult.
“Where once if you couldn’t run fast or shoot baskets you weren’t a success, the curriculum now addresses individual needs — allowing every person to have success — whether they are a boy or girl, tall or short, heavy or thin, in a wheelchair or asthmatic, the new curriculum does a better job than a focus on competitive team sports,” Wiggins says.
Illinois is one of only five states that still require physical education each day. Some schools in other states count recess and lunch periods toward that requirement and offer a formal physical education class only once or twice a week.
Sometimes children give up on physical activity because they have no idea what their own pacing should be or what’s good for their bodies, according to Pam Deahl, a physical education teacher at Highcrest Middle School in Wilmette, where students have physical education 40 minutes a day, every day. “It’s wonderful,” said Deahl. “You can teach them the benefits of warming up and cooling down.”
Deahl has been teaching for 21 years, 11 as a public school P.E. teacher and 10 as a gymnastics coach, while her children were young.
“If you show students a videotape with two children running, one was really overworking, and someone who was really working at their target heart rate and you asked the students to pick who they thought was working where they should be — 9 times out of 10 they are going to pick the one who is working too hard,” she said.
“We try to tailor the fitness to the student and make physical education truly a lifetime activity,” Deahl said. “With a heart rate monitor, we can show them what is good and acceptable. Some kids don’t jog and don’t run because they think they have to be first, so they sprint and stop, sprint and stop. I had one boy this year who amazed me — I ran with him a little bit, just getting him on the right pace, and he did a three-quarters of a mile — he said it was the first time he had done it without walking.”
Highcrest offers the 5th and 6th grade students opportunities to get physical and have fun doing it, including electives in tae bo, tumbling and in-line skating. But beyond that, the students’ well-being is an important part of the Highcrest program. As part of dance, which is offered in the curriculum, 6th graders come in at lunch and work out choreography to their own music.
“For Halloween, our PTO ran a `Freaky Friday’ social,” Deahl said. “To help the kids feel comfortable, we made up dances to Halloween songs — things like `Monster Mash’ and `Ghostbusters.’ We taught those dances (in physical education class).
“That night at the social, when the disc jockey put the dances on, everybody had a few dances they could do. The worst thing for a middle-school student is to go to a dance and stand there. This was something everyone could do, special needs students, everyone.”
And that’s just what Wiggins says P.E. programs should be about. “We now know that you can’t just compartmentalize education, of any kind, and separate mind from body from heart from soul,” she says. “A curriculum that focuses on individual growth and holistic wellness and personalizes education is certainly going to nurture more potential in an individual.”
