Lewisburg School has challenged other local elementary schools during NTI instructional days: Stay active!

Darren Waldo, physical education teacher at Lewisburg Elementary, created the challenge after seeing physical education resources from around the country being shared in PE teacher Facebook groups.

“We’re doing an amazing job of ensuring our students are continuing to learn in core academic areas during these NTI days, but I wanted to make sure our students have an avenue to stay active during these days as well,” said Waldo.

Classroom teachers are using Google Classroom to provide instruction to students, but for physical education teachers, this creates a challenge.

Waldo played soccer at Ohio Valley College and is a former high school soccer coat.

“Physical Education is a challenging area to incorporate through online learning, and many of our students don’t get enough physical activity on a typical day. I wanted to give some incentive for our students to remain active and to spend a little less time playing video games in their free time,” Waldo added. “I decided to utilize some resources that were being shared in some of the PE groups I’m in and create a website for our students to use.” 

Waldo created a website that allows students to see a Bingo game sheet. The website can be accessed through a link on the Lewisburg webpage. Students are challenged to get a “Bingo” and then record their activity through a Google Form. The student must be logged in to their Google account to submit the finished challenge. Students can record a Bingo each day, and parents will initial the form signifying the child’s participation. The school with the most Bingos at the end of spring break (April 10th) will be declared the winner.

“Our school (Lewisburg) is going to offer incentives for our students who participate every day of the challenge, and we’ll do some giveaways for students who are active during this time. Dr. Matthews (Lewisburg’s Principal Josh Mathews) was very supportive of this idea and pushed me to make it a reality. Hopefully, the other schools in our district will do something similar with the challenge to ensure their students are being active and participating as well,” said Waldo.