Welcome back to the 20 days of summer school physical education series! If you are just joining this series, stop right now and check out Summer School Physical Education: Day 1. What Works and What Doesn’t.

The post above details what I will be talking about day to day, and how it can help you improve your social distancing physical education classes in the fall. It also lays out my class size, class time frames and space I am able to use.

If you are currently teaching summer school physical education, please leave comments on what works for you! I love collaborating, so let me know what you’re up to.

Friday Classes

The other two PE teachers in the building and I decided on Fridays we will station ourselves in either the field house, weight room or outside and let our kids pick where they wanted to work.

We set up multiple activities they had learned or played this week, or were able to enjoy both tracks and bleachers to workout on.

Since I have been working all week with my class either outdoors or in the performance gym I have been on my kids about masks and social distancing. Even though they need reminders, they know the expectation. Outside they didn’t need to wear them unless they were at a safe distance.

You’ll find out what happened when I mixed my kids with a teacher who does not care if his students follow the safety rules or not in the improvements and modifications section.

What Worked:

Letting the kids engage with their friends in the other classes was really nice to see. My students almost feel like “gym” class isn’t fair because the other two classes merge together.

We were split up into three classes with staggering start times, but one of the teachers insist they just all work together regardless of all the room we have here at the school. So when my kids see that, I can tell they think it’s unfair.

But anyways, our numbers stayed low when we tried this out. Kids were really excited to get to choose their activity and they all split up pretty evenly. Even when they moved on to one of the other teachers activities, the class sizes stayed pretty consistent.

The morning class was great, and it was actually surprising to see the majority of them kept their masks on while playing various kickball games outside. Every so often I would walk by their lines and tell them if they can stick their arms out and touch the person next to them while their arms are also out, then they are too close.

Improvements or Modifications:

Unfortunately, in the afternoon class I told them we would only be outside for an hour, and by 12:30 pm we would move to the field house due to a thunderstorm coming. When this happened, the field house teacher also had to leave so now there are only two locations for all three classes to be in.

This wouldn’t be a big deal since the field house had plenty of room, but the teacher that was in there was not paying attention, and when I came in almost everyone had their masks off and were playing close contact sports.

I don’t know how he teaches, because I’m in a different gym but my students know my expectations, let alone the school rules about COVID-19 safety. I’m always making sure they are distanced and have their masks on correctly. They know we aren’t going to be playing a 5 on 5 basketball game. But even my students who stayed in the field house with the other teacher had their masks completely off.

Honestly this made me really anxious. As soon as I got onto the gym floor I went to every kid and told them to put a mask on and distance themselves. Students that weren’t mine looked visibly annoyed that I was telling them to do what they should have already been doing.

For the future, I will talk to every class as a whole and let them know my expectations are high no matter what area they choose to go to. Outside is easy, because the masks can be taken off. But if I am stationed indoors, anyone in my group will understand I take the rules seriously.

This was kind of an eye opener for me. Since teachers and kids are pretty much stuck in their classroom with limited time to congregate you have no idea what other teachers or kids are doing. Classroom teachers obviously don’t need to be moving around the school, but in PE we can use multiple locations to help their experiences and activity levels.

So if you plan something like this for your future classes with other teachers, have a CLEAR game plan and don’t be passive with other teachers or kids who aren’t yours if you feel they are blatantly disrespecting the rules.

Overall

This week has been amazing. Sometime I nail it like with my Soccer Kickball game, and other times it’s so stressful worrying about if I’M doing everything in my power to keep my kids healthy.

Whether you believe in masks or not. If you believe COVID-19 is a threat or not. It doesn’t matter. This is the new way of life until we figure it out, and in order to keep our jobs we must play along.

Personally I have been extremely quarantined with my fiance, and take this very seriously. As do a lot of the parents of the kids we are all about to teach. Your job is to keep their kids safe, and if that means we wear a mask and social distance than that’s what we’ll do.

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Previous: Day 4

Next: Day 6