2012 Symposium Integrating Adapted Physical Fitness Into Everyday Life TOM HARLOW: Hello everyone; welcome. I have to say this is a pretty fancy room here. I was hoping for, like, a gym that we can all move around in and all that, but this is great. We’ll make do with this. I tried to put some things out and around so when we get a little time we can do a little cup‐stacking and throw some things around in here and be a little active because I like being active, I do not like – I’m not the type of PE teacher that just goes up and walks around the track. I know some of you guys probably think Adaptive PE teachers like to, it’s like coaches, they like to just get our guys and bring them up and go around the track and around the track and around the track. I do not do that, I’m kind of against that. I like going out and doing different games, adapting games, so everybody can get involved in it. So, what I’m going to do today, Ann invited me in here to talk about my class, the things that I do in my class, and show you guys some different equipment, and things like that that we do. But first, what I wanted to show you guys, I did a little slideshow, I actually did it for the teacher of the year award and I think I’ve had, probably, about four or five superintendents borrow this to show it around the county. And it’s a slideshow that shows my class and along with it is a song, and the song actually goes along with the slideshow and as part of the slideshow because a student that’s in my class, he was in my class, he graduated probably about three or four years ago, he wrote the song. He wrote the song in a poem and all that, and I don’t know if we have any country fans out here, but Brad Paisley found out about it and he recorded a song with our student, his name is Joe Kindergan [sp?], and he went down with Brad Paisley and recorded the song with Brad Paisley and I thought it would be great to put it to a slideshow of the class and Joe is actually in it and all that. So what I’m going to do is show you guys a slideshow here and then after that we’ll talk a little bit more. [Audience views slideshow] TOM HARLOW: All right. That was my class that’s at Falls Church High School, let me get this started here. I teach at Falls Church High School. I’ve been actually teaching there for, I think I’m coming up on my 16th, 17th year. When I first started I had two classes at Falls Church High School and my classroom was actually a classroom and I taught in the cafeteria lobby which was great, but I started coaching girls’ basketball and got to know the administration and the program started growing, more students started coming to Falls Church High School. At Falls Church High School it’s a school, it’s a department there with children with physical disabilities and we, probably, we started with about 18 students and now I actually have taken over the small gym. I actually have another two parts of the gym that I have for our students and we’re up to, next year I believe we’re going to be at 60 students within the school. At Falls Church High School, when I first started there, I started a peer teaching program and the first quarter I probably got maybe two or three students to come in and help with our students and I would grade them and do as any other PE teacher with them, we would play all of our activities. After that year it kept going and I actually have five classes now and every time I go down to the gym each quarter to get peer teachers, students just run to me. They say can I go, can I go, can I go? So we, actually, the teacher says okay you can go, you haven’t been behaving, you can’t go, and so on, so the students are very happy to come in with our group and learn the things that we do in Adaptive PE. I call it, it’s kind of like reverse mainstreaming because we do the things we’re bringing in the Gen Ed with us and showing them the adaptive games that we do. And a lot of people think oh, what kind of games? Well, we play the football, we play the archery, we do all kinds of games with them. But my key is fun and make it exciting. And the thing is, and I’ll show you guys, I get a volleyball here, you know, everyone’s thinking, oh, volleyball, you get it. If I toss it out, you get a volleyball, that’s great, volleyball, but if I get this and I tossed it out, all right, everyone gets more of a smile, they’re like all right. The thing with the volleyball here is you can’t throw it around too much, you’ve just got to catch it; but with the beach ball, you’re going to get it turning like a graduation and everyone will start hitting it around and things like that. So it’s, like, the fun, and everybody up in back are like ah, I want to get it, too, let me get into it. So, it can be just hit around and all that and everyone you see is smiling. So, with modifications it doesn’t have to be, oh, modification, it’s going to break down the game and everyone’s going to not have fun in it and all that. And you’re going to get the activity out of that beach ball probably more than you are with the volleyball, and the kids really get into it and you see the smiles on their faces and all that. I bring down Gen Ed classes that are in history or things like that. One of their best things to do is come down and play us at beach volleyball. They come out of it and they’re sweating and things like that. And the key is, everybody participates. What I’m going to do is show a slideshow here and show things that we can do with that and the modifications we do with it. Now if I were to bring this out then everyone’s like whoa, this even bigger and a little bit funner and it will just stay in the air a little bit more and all that. So, again, it’s the fun, bring the fun out of the game. You can just do that [unintelligible] with volleyball, with, there we go. I was hoping for a gym, so it’s… but it’s cool. There we go. See, we’re adding, actually, bowling to this, too, so, you can add different things. So I’m going to show a little slideshow here and I’ll go through and I’ll tell you the different games and the different activities that we do at Falls Church High School. So it’s motivating games that we’ll look at and all of my classes and games, I want them, again, motivating to the student because I’m not the type of teacher that says okay, we have fitness testing today, you have to do 20 sit‐ups, you have to do 30 push‐ups, and so on. That’s great, we’re looking at the fitness level on that, but the students, or kids, are going to be like, oh, really, it’s a little hard for me, I don’t know if I want to do this and they’re going to kind of shy away from it. But if you turn it into a fun activity and kind of add a sit‐up or something like that within a game, they won’t even know they’re doing a sit‐up. One thing I did this year, I started, and I’m hopefully going to add it to Fairfax County’s curriculum, is fishing. Fishing is a great sport, and everyone’s like, when I interviewed with the superintendents they were like, “Fishing? How are you going fishing in the gym? What are you going to do with that, there’s no fish in the gym, you’re not going to catch anything.” I’m like, well, it’s not all about the catching of the fish. It’s, one thing, is the social interaction with people, friends and all that, and the next thing is, there actually is some physical activity in it because they’re casting, doing fly fishing, and different things like that. What I did with our students was, you can see over to the left here, it’s cheerleading mats, I can put those long‐ways and our students get behind it and they would just cast over it. And on the other side they might get a little nibble or something like that, I might put something on the end of it, and then they reel it in and they might catch a gummy fish or something like that. So, and again, when they get it, they’re like oh, what’d I get, what’d I get, what’d I get? Or there might be a big one, they might be pulling on it, they’re like, oh, I got one, I got one. So they’re just reeling it in, they’re getting activity from that. We have skating. Do we have any skaters in here? Anyone skate? Skating’s fun. Again, that can be modified. What we do with some of our guys that are in chairs, I put just kind of scooters. We can put scooters in front of their feet so they get the feeling of skates. We take the leg rests off and they get the feeling and they skate around. Again, this is great when you go in with the Gen Ed classes because the Gen Ed students are, like, ah, this is great because some of the guys are in wheelchairs and they can’t skate, so what do they do? They push them. They go right over to them and, ah, alright, and the kids love it and they get the social interaction from that and they’re moving around the gym. It’s great. Also, if you see over here a scooter, and this is a, we call it turtle, and this is a modified turtle, you can actually put your feet in and strap yourself in, it has a little backrest on it, and you just move that turtle in the front and you take off. And you just start moving them around. Again, the kids love it. You get all the kids interacting together with it. Some other things I do with our kids is rockets. We go out and we fly the rockets, water rockets. We get [unintelligible] they pump it up and generally what I do is have them spread out around the football field or baseball field and whoever’s the closest will get, it will pop, or something like that. So they all run around, I think it’s going to fly here, or I think it’s going to fly here, type thing. Basketball; basketball, we modify it for our students, again, we lower the baskets, different types of basketballs; soft ones, Nerf ones, different things like that. You don’t actually have to use a basketball. Things like this, something they just grab ahold, because some of the students might not be able to hold the basketball. So you can grab it ahold here and you can toss it real light, soft, not going to hurt anyone, and all that. Again, we have peer teachers that go around, I call them peer teachers; peer helpers. They go around and help our students. This is my modified bow that I made and I put it together. My first ten years what put me through school was construction, so I like to think about how to change things and make all of our students participate. So, with this one, what it is is, I put a bow in here and it comes back, I’ll see if I can show you guys; it will come all the way back here like this and we put the arrow in here and all that, and then the students come up and they do their aiming and all that, and they squeeze this, and it releases it. It’s great for all kinds of students with skill level because I have some students that can barely just move their fingers and come up. And they can get in there and they can squeeze that and off the arrow goes. All the Gen Ed students are, I want to use that one, I want to use that one because it’s pretty straight and it goes right at it and it generally hits bulls eye, so I have the table where we can just kind of move it up and down for the students. Everyone says I should patent that and put it in, I don’t know, make some money off it. Again, when we do our archery and all our games, a lot of Gen Ed classes like to join us so they actually come up and they join us within our group. And I don’t like to, I like to put everyone together, they’re shooting that together and all that. Parachute activities; everyone, you think parachute, oh, I’ve played in elementary and all that, but kids love it in high school. I’ll bet if I put it out here and all of us got around the parachute you guys would be, like, yeah, this is cool. It’s great. The kids just get into it. What we do is sometimes, some of the kids, we put up underneath, we shake it all under and they’re all like, ah. Parachute activities are a lot of fun. One teacher within our school is kind of like, adaptive PE, you’re not going to get that much exercise and all that, which she’s totally wrong because she joined us, actually, on the parachute activity and she was, and she came out and she was sweating and all that. I was, like, see, you get some exercise in here on that. This picture, I like this picture, as you can see the students, this is what I strive for is the smile on her face. Actually, when I was interviewing with the superintendents they were like, well, how do you know that your students are learning and they’re getting their activity and all that? And I was like, well, I could say all this assessments and all this, but my answer was the smile on their face. If they’re smiling at me I know I’m doing something right. And I know they’re getting activity out of this and fitness, so the smile is my assurance on that. Again, it’s not just the students with special needs that are getting the smile and all that; it’s the peer teachers and everyone and our students within the school because, really, the department within the school, and I’m thinking we’re probably at 1600, in our school, and generally they stay in that department, but the PE, the small gym is on the other side of the school, so they actually come out in the hallways and get to know the peer teachers and Gen Ed students. They, hi, hey, how ya doin’? Hey Joe, hey, how you doin’ Brian? All that. And they just get out into the general population. This is my favorite. I’m kind of, my wife got me hooked on pinball machines, video games and all that. I love pinball machines, so I get on Craig’s list and see if anybody would like to donate pinball machines, so I have pinball machines in my classroom. I have arcade driving, sit down driving machines and all that. People are like well, you don’t want to turn it into an arcade and all, but with this, we generally, every now and then we’ll do this. It’s not like come in, we’re playing pinball, come in we’re playing this. We’ll do it occasionally, but with pinball machines and all that, it’s great hand and eye coordination. With the ball coming down and you’re looking at the balls, it’s fantastic for the students. Again, it’s social because you can get two to three players, you come in, everybody enjoys it, so…. One thing I do that most other Gen Ed classes don’t do is fencing. I love fencing, it’s a great sport for our students because it’s different modifications that you can do. We actually have, for some students they’re going to get the full gear and fence against each other. For modification that I do for some of our students, if they don’t want to go into the actual gear and all that, I put up pins and they don’t go right at the student, they have to knock the pins over. You’re protecting the pins, so it’s actually competitive there, and they’re actually going out and lunging and all that, and you’re getting the fencing out of it. It gets competitive, too, very competitive. And we use a Nerf’s foil that we use for that and it bents right at the tip here and it’s great. We call this the light sabre. Kids like getting it and going whzz, whzz, move around. Again, we have – you can do the full fencing, full gear, and all that. The student to my left up here, he is totally blind and goes off of the foil, we have him just touching as we go along and her hears it. And it just, it’s great. He’s never fenced before and he just loves it. A lot of my activities, what I try to do, last year I got some Wiis donated to the school and, again, I’m not like all right we’re going in and we’re going to play on the Wii. What I like to do is have a little bit of each, so I’ll have stations set up and we’ll have stations around and we’ll have the adaptive area, we’ll have more of the gears, the whole full gear on, and then they’ll be fencing with the Wii. So it’s no other games, its actually fencing and it’s, I don’t know if you guys have done fencing with the Wii; it’s great, just like fencing. Again, the smiles, love to have the smiles. And these guys are doing it with the full gear on. When they get done they’re like, ah, yes. What we do here, we have judges and our students are the judges if they’re not participating in the match. Dancing the Virginia Reel, I do dancing with the kids, the kids love it. We set up, try to set it up so you have a pseudo, with physical disabilities, special needs, with a Gen Ed student and vice versa, with a male/female and the guys, especially the guys, love it, oh, yeah, I had – she was my partner this time, she was my partner this time. Again, it’s modified, so the dancing and the chairs, they’ll come up and the partner will go round and the partner goes back and you can swing and then swings around with the chair and all that. It’s great. Sometimes I’ll put chairs here if they get too tired or what, and they’ll come up, they’ll come back and they’ll sit down, get back up, and then do it again. This is a popular game that we do, it’s called Mission Impossible. And what we try to do is they have to get from one side of the gym to the other side of the gym and they cannot touch the floor. They can only get on the mat or inside of the hoola‐hoop, on a scooter, or on a carpet square. And the way I modified this is if you’re in a chair or if you are having a hard time to jump to a spot, what we do is, I have the jump rope and the jump rope must be attached to somebody that is on a carpet square or on a mat and all that and to having our students try to figure that out because I just let them go and have them figure it out. It’s really cool to see that. And they get into it and they race, it’s one team against another team and whoever can go up and back and they just go at it. The boy right here that’s pulling the jumprope, he’s the one that wrote the song for Brad Paisley. It was a great song, do y’all like that song? It’s a really nice song. As you can see, everyone’s into it; they’re smiling, they’re competitive, they’re trying to get back and racing and all that. What’s really cool with the peer teaching, as you can see, some of the, we get students that are the real quiet ones that want to volunteer, then you get the athletes that want to volunteer, so you get a great mix. Another neat part of that is the quiet ones always think, and I’ll go back to fencing with this, the quiet ones, when you get a mask on them, and all that, ah, you can’t beat them fencing. They come out. They’re really good in fencing. But in here, it’s like, the ones that really, in a Gen Ed class, are not going to really get up and run around, whereas here, they’re more apt to help and they’ll get up and help out a lot more. This one here is, this is my lacrosse and with lacrosse we have this here. And assistant of mine made these and it works great. What we do is get balloons and this is their lacrosse sticks and they hit the balloons. She fancied this one up; you can fancy them up and all that. All it is is a coat hanger and – what is it, pantyhose, I think? Knee high or ankle high, something like that – you can put around it and it works great with balloons. You get the, kind of, the lacrosse feeling of doing it and what I do is I put mats, two goals, on either side and I stand them up and they have to actually hit them into the mats and score that way. We have, at our school, tailgate parties. Every now and then we’ll do, we do for our soccer game, we do for our basketball game and all that, and this is just one of our tailgates that we had and the students come in and we’re doing different activities for them. Of course this one’s for soccer. Dancing, this is another dancing that we’re doing here; trying to bust a move there, but I don’t – can’t do it. But they get down and this is, I think, the Cha‐cha Slide here. They’re getting down into it. It’s great when we do the dancing and all that because the teachers get in with us and students are, like, oh, look at him dance or look at her dance, that’s pretty cool. Then we have, like, a little social and, again, the students get in and – it’s kind of like the guys, they look around and they’re all having fun, smiling. I also do CPR with my students and some people are like well, CPR, they’re not really going to be able to do it and all that and some of the students, why do I have to do it? If you know how to do it and you know the steps, you can tell somebody. So you don’t actually have to perform it, but if you know the steps to tell somebody, that’s great. And with this one here, what I did was do a couple with each step I did a photo with it and wrote below it what the step was and they had to put those in order for the CPR, and it worked great. I actually had some – some students actually really get certified in it. All right, does everybody know what that is? The scene is? Safe. Anybody CPR certified in here? This one I like, it’s just that you can see that our students are looking, really actually look up to our peer teachers. And a lot of our peer teachers look up to our students, too. But this, we go to the weight room at least, probably once a week, I try to get there once a week. We go in there, we go in the actual weight room, the school weight room, and go around and we adapted the equipment around there. With the, I generally have the peer teachers pair up with our students. Therabands are great. You can do so many different things with them; you can do the push‐ups, you can do the sit‐ups, and pull‐downs and all that. Some of the students, I will just get behind them and get the therabands and they’ll pull out like this. So when the other students, Gen Ed students are able to do some other things I’m, like, well, you can do that, too, you just do it this way and you can do it right next to them. This student here loves to show his muscles, he’s like, ah, my guns. This is just a medicine ball that we just kind of toss around. Again, with the medicine ball, the medicine ball can be very heavy, two pounds, four pounds, six pounds, or it can just be a light ball and you just use different skill level in each circle. I taught, for a couple of years, I taught life skills and what we would do is just go out and around the building and do, I wanted to do some type of physical activity, but make it useful and a life skill. So we would go down and paint different rooms and they would get that workout and they were, like, yeah, whoa, with a roller and a paint brush and all that. There’s Brian there. We would also go around and plant different gardens and things like that around the school. So they get a little workout with the shoveling and all. At the end of the year we have our PD [?] Fun Day. We just had that last week. The kids have a great time, they love the water balloons at the end; we do a little water balloon toss and they just love it. They love, I just give a couple of students a water balloon and they come up behind their teacher and just whish, and they just get a lot of enjoyment out of that. I think I got hit by that one. This is Regatta Boats. I don’t know if we have any Boy Scouts in here, Cub Scouts. My son, probably about five years ago, was in Cub Scouts and they had Regatta Boats. I had never really heard of them, but they had boat racing and what you do is you get wooden, a little piece of wood and you sand it down and you paint it and you put the, all the little equipment on it and the rudder and all that on the keel, and the sail, and you paint it and all that, and you race them. So it’s, this is a great activity because you’re in there, you’re sanding, putting something together that’s unique to you, and then when you race them you get the competitiveness out of it. You put it, it actually floats, and you get a straw, and they blow. And you blow on it and they race each other and kids love that. They get a lot of fun out of that. One thing I love doing is kite flying. You don’t see it too much in schools, but I love it. It’s a great activity because you get out there and just trying to get that kite up you’re running around, and once you get up, you know, you’re just like, looking at it, you’re moving around, you have to move and all. And the smiles on the kids’ faces are just fantastic from this. And you can do so many different types of kites, you can, I don’t know if you guys have seen that you can have some that you can actually drive in the sky and all that, you can move it. I haven’t gotten that far, just the plain kites. I’m not skilled enough to do that, I have to practice a little bit. But you can fly them around. We have one student that’s from the Middle East and he’s, like, well, kite flying is one of the number one sports where they are and he just, and he’d never flown a kite and he flew a kite and he’s, like, this is just amazing. All right, other fun activities; some things that we do are bubbles because with bubbles you get the wind, you get your lung, expand your lungs and all that, it’s great, blow through, get the bubbles out and all. Paper airplanes, I love. Mess around with paper airplanes, kids get paper airplanes you get different instructions, directions, on different types. The kids like getting in there and making them and you fly them around. Cup‐stacking; cup‐stacking is – has anybody in here ever cup‐stacked before? Miss [unintelligible], that’s it? Well if you guys see in front of you, we’ll try it out. In front of you are some cups [unintelligible]. This is great, it’s a great activity. You guys can grab some cups, you can put it in front of you. We’ll do a little fun activity with it. If you don’t have any in front of you, you can go grab some from somewhere else. This is great, it actually has world competition in this. It’s unbelievably fast, but, what you do is, and it’s great crossing midline here because you’re working with both right and left hand, so you’re pulling it and you’re kind of making a stack, like that. So it’s you up‐stack and then you down‐stack. Left up‐stacking there, and then down‐stack. So, again, it’s, like with the six, I can do six here, once you get better, like this here, I pull three up, I pull two up, I drop, drop, drop, I have six. It’s a lot of working there on that. Always when we start this the kids start going like this and we let them do that because it’s always fun to see how you high you can go without dropping the cups. And we have our student that is vision impaired – totally blind – he made it to 28 cups high and he’s totally blind. And I was, like, it was amazing to me because he just feels, if you actually close your eyes and try to stack that, that’s like, wow, how am I going to do it without flipping it over? But he actually did 26 high, from the floor, just went straight up, he would just feel it and went straight up with it. ATTENDEE: [Unintelligible]. TOM HARLOW: Yes. A timer, you have a, it’s a little mat that goes out, you have a timer on it. Speedstacks is actually a name brand and the timer, as you have your hands down, as soon as you lift your hands you go dut, dut, dut, dut do your, what they have in competition it’s three, six, three, so you’re stacking three, you’re stacking six, you’re stacking three. Then you have to down‐stack three, down‐stack six, down‐stack three, and then you touch your timer. And a three‐six‐three, I think, is around two, one‐point‐eight seconds, two‐point‐eight‐three seconds, something like that. It’s unbelievable. The kids are just d‐d‐d‐d‐d‐boom! And you’re like whoa, how do they do that. But very competitive, you guys can go on You Tube or something like that, you can just put in cup‐stacking, speed‐stacking. It’s actually been on commercials for McDonald’s and all that. But it’s interesting. It’s great for a lot of our students and some of the Gen Ed students, too, because you think with midline, a lot of people, with basketball, you know, you can dribble with your right hand, but sometimes with that left hand it’s a little hard. So with this it actually helps you with your left hand and actually going, dribble from right to left, left to right, crossing the midline there because a lot of students have trouble going from right to left and left to right. This is what helps tremendously with it. ATTENDEE: So part of your planning is figuring out how to [unintelligible]. TOM HARLOW: Yes, how to figure it out which hand’s going where, you’re thinking, your right brain is going with your left brain, and all of that. Some of our students, it’s kind of like they will just stack one at a time, which is great. Some of my students I just set the cups down and they just have to try to stack them up, like that, if they can do two, it’s great. And that way everyone is working together with it. So speedstacks, lot of fun. ATTENDEE: These are available at Walmart or Target – TOM HARLOW: Right, and Toys‐R‐Us. ATTENDEE: And Toys‐R‐Us, or whatever, but I use them, I have a special needs Boy Scouts Troup and we usually start our meetings with, like, brain gym to kind of get their minds focused and kind of get their bodies in check, and then we do this stuff, the stacking also, at the end to kind of bring them back from wherever they’ve been during the meeting. And I’ve had parents that come and go are you doing the Cub Scout [unintelligible]. They have just as much fun doing it as the kids. It is such a great thing for their coordination and I have all levels of boys in my Troup as well. TOM HARLOW: Yeah, a great activity and you can actually get these cups and make them into more fitness‐involved because you can do a three‐stack and do relay with it. So they go down, three‐
stack, go to the next one, six‐stack, go down to the next one, three‐stack, then they’ll have to run back, down‐stack, run back, six‐stack, run back, touch the next person, the next person goes, and that you do speedstacking that way. It’s a lot of different things that you can do. One thing that I do, I think it’s a lot of fun, and it’s more of a memory game or speed game, is I will, behind a mat, I will stack this in a certain way and then they have to figure out how I stacked it and go with it. The first group that stacks like mine, I will get candy or something, something healthy, or get bananas or apples or something like that. But they love the blow‐pops. But a memory game like that is great. Another memory game that I do, I like to do, for our guys, is in one room END I will set, I might have a chair, a pin, a hoola‐hoop, a paddle, and I’ll arrange it in a certain way and they have to come in, in another room there’s probably five different groups and they have the exact same amount of equipment material that I have in the other room, they, one person, comes into the room, they look at it, they have to go back and tell the other three or four or whatever the group members are, how to do it. They cannot do it themselves, they have to communicate with them how to put it together. And, again, they’re allowed to go back as many times as they want, but they have to communicate everything with it. That’s a great communication skill on that. They really get into it, running back and forth, ah, I forgot that one, and then going back, see it, then they say put that there, put that there. They really get into it, it’s a lot of fun. The other things here that we do, tennis, big tennis ball [unintelligible] they have a lot of different things there that you can do. If we’re in a tennis unit, again, some of our students may be able to get the tennis racket and hit the ball over and play tennis some, or just hit this. Some may just toss this over back and forth. When I do a sport I like to, I don’t like to have maybe a playground ball or something like that. I like to have whatever we have in that sport, whether it be football, basketball, or volleyball, something that resembles that so they’re feeling that they’re in that game. Just like a football here, it’s a great football, it’s not going to hurt anyone, toss it around, it’s great. Kids just love it. You put this out there they’re, like, yes, the football is out. Pins, a lot of things you can do with pins. We do a, let me see, right behind you is a, what they call that a – yes, a noodle, yes, noodle. So, I toss it back to you and, are you ready? All right, nice catch. So with the noodle you can play a game and you can try to knock over the pin. All right? Good try. So we play a game like that, or we have this up here and you can actually try to toss it through. And we play different games, tossing it through the noodles, through the hoola‐hoop and the pin and all that. So, lots of different games that you can do. Let’s see, we’re getting close to the end here. I’m going to wrap it up. If you guys have any questions or anything; you guys have any questions that you’d like to ask? I hope you guys enjoyed and got something out of this. I appreciate you coming in for it. And enjoy the rest of your day.