10 Ways to Exercise During the School Week

January is almost over and if you’re like me those New Year’s Resolutions to workout more are quickly disappearing. So, I thought today I would write about a few ways to get to that workout during a busy school week.

1.) Try getting up 30 minutes early.  This one is difficult for me, because I LOVE to hit the snooze button.  But, when I do succeed to get up early and do a quick workout before work, the entire rest of the day runs better.  I have more energy and I’m much more alert.  Plus, I get to take a shower after my workout and end up feeling much more refreshed.

2.) Park 20 minutes away from your school.  If you can get up early, but don’t love to spend that time doing an aerobics video or crunches, leave for work early but park farther away from your school.  I tend to park in a grocery store parking lot or somewhere else where I feel my car will be okay during the day.  Then, walk or jog the rest of the distance to work.  The bonus to this technique is that you will have the same walk or jog at the end of the day, doubling your workout by default!

3.)  Start out your day with number aerobics.  Get your kids in the act!  When I taught first grade, we started out each day with number aerobics.  The kids worked on counting and groups of ten while getting their giggles out and waking up.  Meanwhile, I did all of the motions with them and raised my heartbeat a bit each morning.  Feel free to download my number aerobics poster for free from Google Docs.

  4.)  Use aerobics or yoga for brain breaks.  Kids stop and stretch or stomp to get their brains going, but do you?  Join in on those brain breaks and reap some of the workout benefits from it.  Some of my favorite brain breaks are 2 minutes worth of jumping jacks or seeing who can hold down dog or plank the longest.  Kids get some exercise and a bit of a break and guess what, so do you!

5.)  Play tag with the kids at recess.  I truly don’t know how kids play tag non-stop every day at recess. However, I do know that running around with them gets my heartbeat up and builds my stamina. I still can’t run for twenty minutes straight like my kids can, but exercise is exercise.  The kids also love having an involved teacher so this helps you to build relationships too.

6.)  Crunch after lunch.  Got a duty free lunch?  What does that really mean?  For me it was 10 minutes to eat, 5 minutes to go to the bathroom and 10 minutes to socialize or pretend I was going to get some work done.  In those final 10 minutes, you could get a lot of crunches in. Take 10 minutes and get in as many different crunches as you can.  Find a partner who wants to crunch with you, or just enjoy a quiet, dark classroom to get in a quick 10 minute crunch break.

7.)  Do a workout video in your classroom before heading home.  There are amazing videos out there to help you get a good workout.  Unfortunately, by the time I get home, the last thing I want to do after picking up kids and fighting traffic is start a workout.  So instead, take a half an hour to get that exercise out of the way – and increase your energy – as you walk out the door to go to your second job (wife, mother, housemaker, etc.)

8.)  Go running with friends directly after school.  Don’t like workout videos?  Get a friend and go out for a walk, jog or run as soon as your official duties have completed. 

9.)  Start a school running club.  Many kids need exercise as much as we do.  Start a running club for kids afterschool and have a great excuse to keep you – and your students – in shape.

10.)  Stretch while you cook.  Cooking dinner often takes up a bulk of my evening.  However, at least half of that time is downtime.  You’re waiting for something to boil, bake, brown, etc.  While I am waiting, I have taken to doing random yoga and aerobics moves: leg lifts, squats, standing yoga poses, etc.  I probably don’t get a full workout, but if I’ve done at least one other thing on this list, this makes me feel like I’ve had a complete workout.  It also keeps me from checking work e-mail while I cook, which is what I used to do with that downtime.

Hope some of these tips will help you to meet that New Year’s resolution of staying in shape while also keeping up with your busy life as a teacher (and possibly mother, wife, etc.).

Resources for Teaching About 9 Amazing Americans

In addition to running this blog, my RVing with the Rakis blog and homeschooling full time, I also create and sell resources that teachers can use in their classrooms and home schooling parents can use to help out their children.  To be fair, I am not creating nearly as many resources this year as I did in the past 9 years, for 2 reasons.  Reason #1 – I already have over 500 resources available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store, so much of what I need for my kiddos I have created already.  Reason #2 – I only have 3 students this year, so I have need of less resources.  However, I am going through resources that I made while I was teaching in a classroom full time and “cleaning them up” with clearer teacher directions, better fonts, etc.  I am also finishing out groupings or “series” that I have started and putting them into bundles so that teachers who are interested in buying multiple items from the same category have the opportunity to save some money.  For the next few weeks, I am going to spotlight some of the resources I have available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

Four years of my teaching career were spent teaching 3rd grade in Georgia.  A large part of our Social Studies curriculum was to teach students about 9 Americans who were important historical figures.  Through these figures we taught geography, history, government and character.  We looked at the events that shaped their lives to make them who they were.  We also looked at the events that they helped to create and how those events shaped history.

The 9 Americans that are taught as part of the Georgia Performance Standards are: Paul Revere, Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, Mary McLeod Bethune, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thurgood Marshall, Lyndon B. Johnson and Cesar Chavez. 

When I was teaching this unit, it generally covered two quarters or more, so I made sure to have consistency between each person we studied.  We had a large, classroom wide timeline where we posted important events from each person’s life.  This helped students to make connections between those individuals who worked and lived at the same time and eradicated misconceptions like the idea that Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr. were friends – which one student told me before we started our timeline.  Then, after we studied each person, I printed my students these timelines to use as a “cheat sheet” and keep in their notebooks.

One thing I learned while teaching this unit was that most of my third graders had great difficulty understanding what life might be like in 1745 or 1900.  The idea that there was life with no electricity, no t.v., no video games, blew their minds.  Then add in things like girls not being able to attend school and they were flabbergasted.  Additionally, they thought that life in 1745 was identical to life in 1920.  In order to help change their misconceptions, I put together Time Machine Power Points.  These Power Points gave students some information to help them truly understand what life was like for each of these people growing up.  To make it more fun, we would turn off the lights, stand up and spin around as if we were being transported to a new time. 

Once we had learned the important facts about each of the 9 historical figures, I let the students choose one person to become an expert on.  Using my Amazing Americans Technology Project, the students would research their figure and create a Power Point or Prezi to present to the class with the information they found.  This aligned beautifully with my Informational Writing Unit.  Next, they would use the same information to create a brochure explaining why their person should win an award, which worked us into our Persuasive Writing Unit. 

 

Finally, as a review for our Comprehensive Unit Test, the students would explore the Amazing Americans Internet Scavenger Hunt.  This is one of the first internet scavenger hunts I ever designed, and the way the students responded to it inspired me to create many more. I know have over 40!  It also provided a great way for the kids to solidify their knowledge about these historic individuals.

After I taught this for a few years, I put together the timeline, the technology project, the internet scavenger hunt and the comprehensive test into an Amazing Americans Bundle, which you can find on Teachers Pay Teachers.  Just recently, I bundled all of the American History Time Machine Power Points,including the years 1745 (Paul Revere), 1830 (Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass), 1880 (Mary McLeod Bethune), 1900 (Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt), 1920 (Thurgood Marshall and Lyndon B. Johnson) and 1940 (Cesar Chavez),  which you can also find on Teachers Pay Teachers.  I hope that all of these resources will be able to help you better teach your students about these 9 Amazing Americans, whether you live in Georgia or anywhere else in the world.