PROMOTING YOUR PE PROGRAMS

Greetings! I often try to think of ways to promote my physical education program. For me, it is not a means to “toot” my own horn, or to show off what I am doing in my classes. On the contrary, I use it as a way to show the families in my school community ways in which they can stay active. Whether it is a newsletter article about something important in health and wellness, an activity the students are participating in, a family participation night, or just inviting parents to participate in your classes, you are not only promoting your physical education program, but showing families ways to engage in physical activity.

In this month’s issue, I will list a variety of ways that you can use to promote your physical education program. I will also highlight a variety of interdisciplinary games and activities that you can use in your classes. Enjoy the issue!

Laura Petersen
Interdisciplinary Section Editor

Plan a Physical Education Program Night
This article from a member of Virginia AHPERD highlights the planning process for a physical education program night. The author goes through the steps to take when setting up this type of program.

PE4Life
Pe4Life is a not for profit organization whose mission is to inspire active, healthy living by advancing the development of quality, daily physical education programs for all children. Pe4Life has a community action kit that can be used to promote physical education.

National Coalition for Promoting Physical Activity
The National Coalition website has a number of excellent tools that you can use to promote physical activity in your school. The Tools to Promote Physical Activity section has a State Coalition handbook, which has tools and strategies for promoting physical activity.

In addition, the National Coalition for Promoting Physical Activity has an E-newsletter, which you can sign up for, to receive a wealth of information regarding physical activity and grants to promote physical activity.

Finally, The National Coalition for Promoting Physical Activity has published Active Communication: A Guide to Reaching the Media. This guide takes you through the different ways to promote an event or activity through the local media. It gives a step by step listing of how to get your message out to the public.

Physical Education Newsletters
An easy way to promote your physical education program is to publish a simple newsletter using a word or publisher program. Microsoft Publisher (check academic pricing) has numerous pre-designed templates that you can use for your physical education newsletter. Publish and send home a newsletter once a month that highlights the activities/units that you are presenting in your physical education classes. You can also highlight different topics related to health and wellness to promote healthy living.

Parent Visitation
Another way to promote your Physical Education program is to invite your students’ parents in to participate in a physical education class. I do this during my dance unit each year. I invite the parents to come during their child’s regularly scheduled physical education class to participate in a variety of dances. This serves as the culminating activity in my yearly dance unit. This is always a very exciting class, and the parents LOVE to get involved with their children!

PEDOMETER WALK ACROSS AMERICA

A pedometer Walk Across America activity is a great interdisciplinary activity for physical education classes. Students participate in a regular physical education class, while wearing a pedometer. At the end of each class, the students record on a chart, the number of steps taken during class. By adding up the number of steps each day, you can determine distance walked.

Classes, grade levels, or schools can participate in the activity together, depending on the situation. Choose a route around the United States traveling from capital to capital. As you reach a capital city, take time out to discuss basic geography and interesting facts about each state.

This interdisciplinary activity incorporates math, geography, and social studies. This is a fabulous activity, and your students will be sure to love it.

The PE CENTRAL LOGIT program is an online program with the same concept. However, the teacher registers the classes online, and each student has to log on and enter the number of steps taken each day using their own username and password. The program will determine how far the classes have walked, and what cities they have reached. It also has a listing of geography and facts about each state the group travels through on their journey.

ENERGIZERS
Energizers are classroom based physical activities that integrate physical activity with academic concepts. These are short (about 10 minutes) activities that classroom teachers can use to provide activity for children within the regular classroom. Physical Education teachers might also use these great activities as a supplement to a physical education lesson. There are energizers for grades K-8.

Diabetes is a serious disease that affects the body's ability to produce or respond properly to insulin, a hormone that allows blood glucose (sugar) to enter the cells of the body and be used for energy. Nearly 21 million children and adults in the U.S. have diabetes. It is the fifth deadliest disease in the U.S. and it has no cure.

Check out the Insulin Resistance section of this month's (Nov '06) pelinks4u health section.

CLASSROOM IDEAS

These lessons and activities are designed for grades K-12. You can incorporate these educational materials into your lesson plans, or designate a special day or week to focus on them. There are ideas to guide you through classroom discussions about healthy living and diabetes, and suggestions for further exploration.

Read also the category "ADD, ADHD, or Something Else Entirely?" in this month's (Nov 06) health section.

DOES ADHD EXIST? (From PBS - Frontline)
The first 3 paragraphs from this great article.

The American Psychiatric Association's diagnostic manual, the DSM, lists 18 behaviors, from which a teacher can check off behaviors she observes in the potential patient or student. Likewise, the parent or caregiver does the same thing. In the current DSM, if one checks six or more of the nine, the individual is deemed to have ADHD.

Let there be no mistake about it. Present-day psychiatry, led by the National Institute of Mental Health in league with the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry, represents ADHD . . . to be a biologic abnormality of the brain, a so-called neurobiologic disorder. Their representation to the entire public and to all the teachers and all mental health professionals is that, having ticked off six or more of these nine behaviors, one has diagnosed an organic or a physical abnormality of the brain.

Their neurobiologic propaganda has been so intense for so many years, that the country believes in this. ... We've got probably, conservatively . . . six million [children in the United States] on medications for ADHD and a total of nine million with neurobiologic psychiatric diagnoses of one sort or another, on one or more psychotropic drugs. Here we're talking about as many kids as you've got people in New York City, and to me, this is a catastrophe. These are all normal children. Psychiatry has never validated ADHD as a biologic entity, so their fraud and their misrepresentation is in saying to the parents of the patients in the office, saying to the public of the United States, that this and every other psychiatric diagnosis is, in fact, a brain disease. Read the rest...

ADHD: An Epidemic? (William Carey) - Is ADHD a valid diagnosis? Also read the companion article: ADHD: An Epidemic? (Laurel Leslie) - Is ADHD overdiagnosed? Read also The Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) Epidemic, an article which states that ADHD can be caused biologically or environmentally, and often is treated by just using better parenting skills.

Neurologist, Dr. Fred Baughman, talks about the fraud of ADHD and the poisoning of U.S. children (August 30, 2006)

An excerpt below:

Mike: (interviewer) Do you mean to say that there is a group of psychiatrists who meet in a room somewhere and they just write down and invent whatever behavioral observations they want to assign to this disease definition?

Dr. Baughman: That is exactly the way it works. In medicine, including my specialty, neurology, if a curious observant physician discovers a new abnormality in a patient in his practice or in his clinic at medical schools, that previously unobserved abnormality is the new disease. So there has to be an objective abnormality. In diabetes, there is elevated blood sugar in the blood throughout all the tissues. With cancer, a pathologist has to see cells that have abnormal nuclei and chromosomes under the microscope in order to contend that the patient has that disease or a disease. But in psychiatry, the committee of the diagnostic and statistical manual meets in a room and by a show of hands, they consider one another's favorite galaxies or mixture of behaviors and vote those into existence and give it a code number or an entry into the DSM, and they are all psychiatric disorders. By the word "disorder," they mean disease.

Read the whole interview.

Anatomy Lesson - Asthma 101
Picture for a moment the airways of an adult male as a network of tiny tunnels equal to the area of a tennis court. There are muscles that wrap around and support the airways. The inside skin of the airways is lined with special cells. Also lining the airways are tiny hairs that move in a wave-like manner to wash inhaled particles and debris up and out of the airways, into the throat, where they are swallowed or coughed up. Read the rest of this little known information.

SchoolAsthmaAllergy.com provides accurate, current, and useful tools and information to empower all those caring for school-aged children with asthma and allergies.

Teaching Tookit - Contained within this section are many valuable tools for school nurses, who are often on the front lines, helping to manage students' asthma and allergies.