October 25 - October 28

I wanted to make you all aware of an event that is taking place soon and I know that typically a lot of our schools participate in it, Stack Up. Stack Up is a world record setting event in which schools participate and submit the numbers of students that they have practicing cup stacking on a given day. This year they are doing a virtual cup stacking photo album and they are looking for students to submit pictures of themselves cup stacking. Here is a link to the website and you can register even if you are at home. STACK UP! There are some guidelines that they are asking you to follow including that they would like the cups to be "SPEED STACK" Brand. That is the company that sponsors the event and are the cups that we use in school. The Stack Up challenge runs from November 18 through December 2. We will feature some cup stacking tutorials in upcoming weeks on this site.

This week my lessons in my class focused on fitness. We practiced a sit up test and a push up test for my 2nd through 5th Graders. When doing this, we modified the exercises to allow for someone to hold our feet during the sit ups. We then challenged students to keep to the pace of the cadence. I will post the link below for what we used. Challenge yourself to go as long as you can and work on increasing the number of sit ups you can do. I set a maximum for my students of 75 even though the tape goes longer. Part of our curriculum is that we work to develop a fitness plan through the setting of goals. For example if imaginary student Joe and Samantha did this sit up test and got the following scores on their initial test , Joe - 35 and Samantha - 42. We would then ask them to practice a realistic goal by increasing this score week by week by 1 to 2 reps in order to strengthen their abdominal muscles. The only way to improve in any skill is to put the time in. The goal would be to look again in January and see if we are making progress on these goals. Again practice is the key to improvement.

We also did a similar process with a push up test performed to a cadence. Again we modified this to allow the person testing to lay completely flat on the ground when the cadence says down and to push up to only having their hands and feet on the ground during the "up" cadence. Try to squeeze your abdominal (tummy) muscles even when doing push ups to help keep your body in a straight position. In a true test your body would not touch the ground in between reps like the second picture below. I will post the video that will provide you with the cadence as well so you can test yourselves at home. Write your number down for how many push ups you were able to perform and we will have you test yourselves again in January to check for progress.

Up next for all of you is a game you can play at home called "BOO"LING. (Bowling). In the video below you will see how you can make a water bottle into a ghost using a sock and some paper to make a target that you can work on some bowling. In bowling there are typically 10 pins, but you could make is be just 6 or even just 1 or two ghosts depending on what you can find around your house. Get creative with your ghost design but also with your bowling activity, maybe you have to roll the ball or a balled up pair of socks, maybe you can kick the ball to knock the ghosts down, for an added challenge you can stand further away from the ghosts as well. Hope you enjoy!