January News from Phys. Ed. - Ryan Van Roekel

In Physical Education, students have been exploring a wide variety of activities that involve a number of different skills and focus points. Using an advent calendar to guide our daily activities in the gym, students got the opportunity to participate in new tag games, challenging fitness exercises and cooperative team tasks.

During ‘The Grinch is It’, students who were tagged had to wait for a ‘Santa’ to come and rescue them with the gift of fitness. ‘Santas’ gave out tennis balls, frizbees, marbles, and hockey pucks, each one revealing a fitness challenge that students completed in small groups.

In ‘Beat the Grinch’s Bell’, students had to run laps while trying to not be the one running when the ‘Grinch’ rang the bell. If you were the lucky one to be running when the bell rang, you were rewarded with a second lap.

Other activities from our advent calendar connected math concepts from the classroom into a fun large group fitness activity called ‘Odds or Evens’. In this game, students chose either odd or even and then used mental math skills to quickly add up the sum of two dice that were rolled on the floor. If they chose the correct line, they got to watch the other group complete a challenging fitness activity. Many students from both lines joined in and completed the challenges together as a large group.

On December 17, Santa gave students a couple of basketball activities to complete. During ‘Santa 7’, the challenge was to complete a fitness activity incorporating dribbling and passing skills into the task. The next was a shooting activity called ‘S-A-NT-A’, where students worked with partners to shoot the basketball from various locations on the court, while trying not to be the first one to spell Santa after missing their shots.

For our last two days, Ms McCune and Mr Van Roekel teamed up to offer the students their final activities from our advent calendar. This was a very exciting and collaborative two-day activity that blended curriculum from both the Music and Physical Education programs of study. Through these lenses, we explored the story of ‘The Nutcracker’ and incorporated challenging movement skills that connected to various parts of the music. On day 2, we used characters from the story and created a fun tag game that had marching toy soldiers, scurrying mice, and graceful sugarplum fairies, all moving around the gym together, connecting their movements to the song being played.song being played. To ‘wrap things up’, students then listened carefully to a Russian dancing song called ‘Trepak’ that would inspire our movements for our upcoming activity using teamwork, cooperation and large parachutes.

Intramurals

Chaparral School offers many opportunities for students to take part in intramurals.

• Badminton
• Basketball 
• Floor Hockey
• Terry Fox Training

Winter Physical Education Intramural Schedule