Gymnastics is fantastic!

A portion of our phys ed curriculum focuses upon beginning gymnastic skills, such as balances, rolls, body awareness and movement. We have an energetic and generous parent volunteer who will be leading us through several activities over the next few weeks! She is a certified gymnastics coach with extensive coaching experience and a love of the sport. The children have been thrilled to work with her over the past week.

Imagine you are 6 years old and you walked into the gym to see this:

The students could hardly contain themselves!

They were bundles of energy during a whole-group warm up game of Signals, where they had to follow the directions from our parent volunteer ... but she gave these directions using her body actions, not her words!

Then the students were divided into groups to complete three different circuits. The goal was to keep the children moving, engaged, and learning. Here are several of the movements and skills the children were practicing in their circuits today:

2-foot hops

Log rolls

Inch-worm walk

(walk your hands forward, inch your feet forward)

Forward rolls

Star jumps

Safe landings

Side to side hops

Walk up the wall, count to 5

Snake crawls 

(careful not to touch the fire rope!)

Egg rolls

(this made many of us very hungry!)

Small 2-foot hops

This was only our second gymnastics lesson, and look at what we can already do! This unit is sure to be challenging and fun!

Many sweaty high fives were given to our energetic parent volunteer! Thank you for sharing your time and talents with our class over the next few weeks. What a wonderful start to our day!