Hello everyone. I hope all is well within your school community, and your school year has been as successful as possible given the circumstances. To date, our school has not had any confirmed Covid positive tests, which is a credit to our administration and the tireless work they put in over the summer to come up with plans and logistics to have a safe return to school. Our school community has also been instrumental in this monumental effort. Their decisions outside of school, from mask wearing, social distancing, and making responsible choices with social bubbles has kept everyone safe thus far. It is difficult to postpone or cancel trips, to not see loved ones in person, or blow off some steam in a restaurant or bar, but individual sacrifices have enabled their children to safely go to school, in-person, these past two months.

Unfortunately, the United States, and my state of Illinois, is not heading in the right direction when it comes to positivity rates and new infections. We are fully braced for what seems to be the inevitable closure mandate if numbers do not improve. A silver lining is that our specific county within Chicago is still under the threshold that we deem unsafe, so locally we are doing a good job. However, that emphasizes the need to not travel to help contain the spread.

I stumbled across this article, easily understandable with helpful graphics, which summarizes the current understandings and risks of Covid (with a special mention to classroom settings). The article was written in Spain, which made me trust the source even more than articles I read hear in the states because the virus has become so politicized here. It was nice to read something that offered facts without bias or opinion. Here is a link to the article.

https://english.elpais.com/society/2020-10-28/a-room-a-bar-and-a-class-how-the-coronavirus-is-spread-through-the-air.html?utm_source=digg

One of the facts that stood out to me was that the occurrence of transmission through surface contact is very low. This is good news, specifically for outdoor recess. Before, we were mandating that students not use their hands when playing with a ball outside. After reading and hearing that surface transmission seems incredibly unlikely, coupled with all the advantages of being outside (superior diffusion, UV light, etc.), we are allowing our students to play with sports balls with their hands outside. As our weather continues to get colder, they more than likely will also be wearing gloves as well, which helps reduce contact spread. By reintroducing sports balls (to be used with hands) back to recess, we hope that will not only add variety, but also make recess more fun in general.

However, I am not going to make that change in PE class, because most of our lessons are indoors. Our gym space is very big with good ventilation, but I want to err on the side of caution and make sure that we are using materials that I can easily sanitize in between uses (and pods). So far the best pieces of equipment for this have been hand held lacrosse scoopers, hockey sticks, and games that rely primarily on kicking. At worst, I am going above and beyond what I believe we need to do to keep the students safe. At best, it is stretching my ability to create games by having natural limitations that force me to be more creative in my approach to making new games that integrate with the Montessori classroom.

I hope my free lesson plans have helped in some way with your social distanced in-person PE, or your at-home virtual PE. Here is a link to our free resources section, where you can find those lesson plans, as well as some other free samples from my volumes. Keep up the good work!