This is an idea that we originally found on PE Central. It looked like a good idea to try. As it turned out, it was FANTASTIC! The premise of the idea is that for every set amount of time that your students exercise, they earn a paper sneaker that gets taped onto the gym wall.

We decided to tell our kids that for every 30:00 that they were involved in some sort of exercise that was outside of the school day, they would earn one of the paper sneakers. If they were doing something that was longer than one half of an hour, (at 30-minute intervals) they would earn more sneakers. When the kids completed the activity, they came to us and told us how many they needed. They took those home, colored them in, labeled them with whatever activity they did and had their parents sign the back. We didn't accept anything that didn't have the parents' signature on it.

The activity could be almost everything. It could be dance class, youth basketball practice, playing outside after school, or shoveling the driveway. We tell them that anything counts as long as the activity gets their heart going fast.

We had a few hundred of these paper sneakers printed up, thinking that was more than enough. Boy, were we wrong. Like most new things, it started off slow. After a while it exploded! We happened to be in a tumbling unit so the dividing door in the gym was open. We ended up filling one of the end walls in the gym. The sneakers reached from the floor to about 10 feet off the floor. We had to step on a foam trapezoid that we had to reach the top. We actually started to fill the adjoining side walls as well.

The kids were not the only ones that participated. My partner and I added our sneakers daily. Other classroom teachers also joined it. It was great to see so much interest, not only from the kids, but from other teachers as well.

We purposely did this idea during the winter, because this time of year is easy to just go home each day and curl up and wait for spring. The Sneaker Wall did a great job by making others aware of all of the activities that are available during the winter months. It got some good conversations going about what each other was up to.