Hello everyone,

It’s been a little while since I posted. I just finished teaching modern US history 1950-present as an online summer school class, and while it was a lot of fun, it was a tremendous amount of work. Last year, while teaching PE to lower and upper elementary, as well as middle school, I was also in an upper elementary classroom teaching culture and science lessons. We finished the year with stay-at-home instruction, and I presented US history 1900-1950. I taught the classes primarily through Powerpoint, so I continued to add onto that presentation to create PowerPoint presentation for the whole century. When the slide count was finally tallied, it has over 400 slides! Besides teaching, for six weeks I was also leading an exercise summer camp with daily morning exercise. In short, I have managed to stay busy this summer.

Even before the end of last school year, we have been preparing for how we would respond this 20/21 school year. Would we be able to open? Would we have to start the school year distance learning as well? I am glad to say with the hard work of our city government, as well as good leadership from our state, I’m pretty sure we will still be in phase 4 when our school year is planning to resume, so that means we will have on-site instruction.

With my participation in two different committees, we have put in a tremendous amount of work planning for the upcoming 20/21 school year. While I have put in some significant hours, there are admin who I know have been routinely remote working 80+ hour weeks. However, it is through this hard work I feel we will be as safe as we can be coming back to school in the fall. It is disappointing that different schools across the country have decided to cut PE and the arts, which I believe students will surely need, not only for the sake of their intrinsic worth, but also as outlets for anxiety, creativity, and everything in between concerning the virus. We will indeed have co-curricular classes which include physical education, because our school understands that movement supports physical and mental health, and they recognize that my lessons will supplement the learning that is happening in the classroom.

To come back safely, our school is implementing a lot of new procedures, which will have ramifications on how PE is taught this year. Some of these new fundamental changes are staggered arrival times, temperature checks before entering the building, students and staff wearing PPE, etc. However, the biggest change concerning the elementary and middle school is the “pod” system that we are implementing to help reduce the spread if indeed someone is exposed. These pod systems essentially are smaller classes run by one adult that stays with them for the day, with help from another adult that is allowed to traverse between two pods. By using this system, children will still get interaction with classmates while reducing vectors for the spread of the virus.

I wasn’t sure what my future held for the this upcoming year. I am a trained lower and upper elementary teacher, with a decades experience in the upper elementary classroom. I was mentally ready to be told that my main role this year was going to be a classroom teacher instead of an athletic director and PE teacher. My role as athletic director is going to be limited since we are not fielding any teams this year. However, I’m working on ways of offering after school sports “camps” or practices that work on fundamentals skills while maintaining core tenets like social distancing. However, without any games or meets, a lot of my AD responsibilities (in terms of administration and scheduling) are not needed this year.

I will continue my role as the PE instructor, but I will also be an assistant in two of the upper elementary pods. I feel it will be similar to last year when I balanced my time by providing in class instruction while creating and testing my own curriculum in the gym. However, this year will provide new challenges to PE instruction, and we are still working out the details. I do not have the full schedule yet, so we are still deciding how I will be seeing the students. I am pretty certain that I will teach the lower elementary by “grade level,” which means that students from each pod would come to the gym with some type of physical barrier (we have a curtain that separates the gym in two, and we could add another level breaking it into four). This is contingent on the number of pods that we will have for lower and upper elementary, so if the gym class size is fairly low for all the square footage I have in the gym, barriers may not be necessary because I would have more than enough room for social distancing. The groups would do the same activity in their sequestered gym space. This will make it harder for me to truly integrate the PE lessons with the classroom curriculum because the different pods will not be in sync perfectly, so I will have to do my best to teach larger themes that still apply to the whole collection of students from all the different pods.

The other way I will teach PE will be taking whole upper elementary pods and working with them, which is much more preferential because I have the flexibility to follow what each pod is doing. The pod size per class would be much smaller, so I would have to take two pods per class, but I feel that is still manageable for finding common ground for classroom integration.

I am lucky that the gym space will still be available for my classes. I know that that many schools may have to retrofit their gym into classrooms to meet social distancing standards. If this is the case for you, getting the kids outside as much as possible is the only solution I can think of if the gym is unavailable. The mindset that there is no bad weather, only “not dressed for the weather” would have to be used if the outside is going to be utilized to its fullest potential.

As far as lessons go, I’m going to look at my already established lessons and see if I can retrofit them to meet the standards for social distancing. Unfortunately, I think that we will probably have to take a close look at games that involve catching and throwing. It is possible for someone with the virus to get it on a surface, and another person touches the surface, then touches their mouth or eyes. We know this is especially true with the younger students, However, as we learn more about the virus and transmission, standards may change. For now, I think that games with throwing and catching cannot be done person-to-person. Games where a ball is kicked back and forth may be a suitable alternative, but again, I will need to read as much as I can about virus transmission. I will also have to develop a sanitation routine with all equipment used after each group, with the best case scenario being I have a set of equipment per pod, but I don’t know how feasible that will be considering storage and budget constraints.

These are just some of the changes happening for next year, and I am sure more will come. For now, I am grateful that my (private) school has enough families who trust in our preparation, and want to continue being in our beautiful school community.

For all of you in the Montessori Physical Education community who have been using my lessons and reading my blogs, am thankful for you as well. I am hope I can support you as best I can this coming school year. I plan on releasing Volume 3 fairly soon with the caveat that most of the lessons written as is could not be used this year. However, when “life returns back to normal,” there are many new lessons that I am sure you and your students will enjoy. What I hope is that by purchasing these lessons, you are simultaneously supporting me in my endeavors while investing in the future. What i will continue to do is release lessons that I create in this social distancing era for free to help as many people as I can. I will release more details for Volume 3 in the coming weeks.

Thank you everyone, good luck on your school year, and stay safe.