Spectacle of Nature

I substitute at my children’s school from time to time.   Today they needed a substitute to help with the PE for two of the classes.   I met the teacher and the children lined up to head out.   The location we have PE is at an art museum that abuts the back of the school property.    To get to the museum grounds we walked single file, exited the grounds gate and headed down the hill.   Just before we entered the woods to follow the path to the museum the teacher said to the students, “remember to be quite for the spectacle of nature.”  The students were indeed respectful of the spectacle, impressive for first through third graders.

When we got to the field area I found out it was the last day in their endurance training.   They were going to be running for thirty-five minutes, tracking how far they ran (or walked and ran) to get a total milage.   The children were in competition with another school and were hopeful they would run farther.

The thing that impressed me was the way the teacher had them track total distance.   He had a big bucket of three-inch plastic balls sitting out and a second bucket lying empty beside it.   He told the children to each take a ball and get ready to run.   He instructed them to drop their ball in the second, now empty bucket when they completed a lap and that every twelve balls in the bucket was one mile run.

The children ran off, dropping balls in, picking up a new ball and ran around for the next lap.   The children had a great time, asking the teacher every now and then what the mile total was as he counted and emptied the second bucket back into the first.  

I liked the method he was using because it fostered team competition without having children competing directly against each other, possibly with hard feelings for those that weren’t able to run as many laps.

One class beat the other school’s distance but the other class just fell short.  They all worked very hard running for over thirty minutes.

The Big Boy Update:  Apparently my son has been doing the running/endurance training at PE as well, but since he never tells us what happens at school, I didn’t even know about it until I was subbing today.   My son is a good runner, I heard.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter said today, “do you remember when we had the snow storm on Movie Night and only one friend came?”  I said I did, did she remember it was our friend, Nitin?  She said, “yes, he was very brave.”