This year I have taken my services to a new district. The grades that I will be teaching are 4th-6th. The first day I saw the students and I smiled because I truly felt like I was where I belonged. The racial makeup of the student body is much more representative of the world than my last school.

My district administrators have clearly stated multiple times that we as teachers need to build relationships with the students as well as create opportunities for the students to build relationships with each other. One way the school is doing that is breaking each grade in half and creating 6 houses. These houses of about 150 students each will be engaging in various team building activities for one period every six days. The house leaders will be organizing and running these activities with input from the various non-tested areas. This means that Art, Music, Physical Education, Spanish, and Health will all be collaborating. The creative energy that will be harnessed has my juices flowing!! Imagine the possibilities!

In my physical education and health classes, we will start the first unit with team/cooperative games. This unit is imperative to my goal of creating an atmosphere where everyone, including myself, wants to be there. I will be relying heavily on the Human Kinetics Book: Team Building Through Physical Challenges. Not only does the book give you ideas it also has videos showing how to do the activities and challenge cards that you can print out to run the activity. I will reflect on the unit in a future blog.

Finally, I would like to leave with you is the introduction slides that I used when introduced to the students. I was able to summarize my philosophy for both health and physical education in 6 slides which you can find here. My challenge to you is if you had to explain your philosophy to parents, staff, and students what would it be? How do you communicate the goals of your program in a simple yet effective manner? The why matters!

Have a great new school year! I can’t wait to share the highs and lows of my new journey!