BEMIDJI — About 100 second-grade students from Bagley Elementary School had gym class on Tuesday.

No big surprise there. What was different, however, was the location.

The Bagley students were part of the Beaver Fitness Day at BSU on Tuesday.

BSU students in “Methods of Teaching Elementary Physical Education for Classroom Teachers” class were able to teach second-graders lesson plans that they created.

“It’s been a really fun and exciting experience,” said Alex Stene, a senior at BSU majoring in elementary education. “More challenging than I thought it was going to be. I’ve done a lot of tutoring in the classrooms, most of us have, and being in the classrooms where kids are sitting in desks versus the free-range that they have here, totally different.”

Adjunct instructor Gwen LaVine, who teaches the course, has organized the program where classrooms from area schools will come work with her BSU class. Students from Northome Elementary School will visit Thursday.

“It’s nice that we, under Gwen’s instruction, are getting this kind of instruction to know how to do that successfully in the classrooms and this is a really good tryout for how it will work in the classrooms,” Stene added.

Tuesday, Bagley students went through four different stations and worked on an academic topic while being physical at the same time. So BSU students taught their lessons four times and the four teachers and students from Bagley will reflect on it.

This is LaVine’s first year as an adjunct professor at BSU after teaching physical education for 15 years.

“We want kids to move a lot when they’re learning and we want their teachers to see some really creative and new fun ways and maybe they can learn spelling words while they’re jumping and the kids get to practice some skills and they know that it’s okay to make mistakes,” LaVine said.

Story courtesy Bemidji Pioneer
April 1, 2015 by Jillian Gandsey