Ronald Harvey students will be boogying down this month as they try to rack up a million minutes of physical activity.
Students at the St. Albert elementary school are tracking the amount of time they spend exercising this January as part of a school-wide challenge to accumulate a million minutes of fitness.
Harvey regularly sets Wildly Important Goals for the school to reach in different months as part of the Leader in Me program, said principal Randy Roszell. The goals are fun ways to build student skills and enhance the school’s sense of community.
Whereas previous ones revolved around math, manners and literacy, staff decided that this month’s would be about fitness in part to work off all those turkey dinners from the holidays.
The school hopes to have their staff and students collectively perform one million minutes of physical activity between Jan. 9 and 31, Roszell said. The school’s 400 students usually each do 400 minutes a week between gym and recess, so they’ll each have to log about another hour a day of sports, snow-shovelling or other activity to meet this goal.
Each class has its own strategy to do that, with some using fitness games inspired by the company GoNoodle to do indoor exercises, Roszell said. He personally planned to log a thousand extra minutes by riding an exercise bike for an extra half hour each day, amongst other activities.
Students are tracking their fitness minutes using bar graphs and contributing them to class totals, Roszell said. Whenever a person or group earns a thousand minutes, he will stick a paper “minute man” onto the Million Minute Mountain display in the front lobby. Hopefully, the mountain will be full of people by the end of the month.
This means Roszell has to cut out 1,000 paper figures using an automatic cutter. “That’s what my overtime job is right now!” he joked.
If the students reach this goal – and they usually do – Roszell said the students will earn some sort of prize at the school’s monthly assembly in February – likely an extra recess. The teachers have split into two teams as well, with the team that does the most activity earning one less day of recess supervision.
It’s all part of the effort to drag students away from technology and lethargy, Roszell said.
“This is an incentive to get them to move away from their computer screens and become more active individuals.”
Parents interested in helping out should contact Roszell at 780-459-5541 for details.
Need a break from all that fitness? Muriel Martin students will help you exercise your brain Thursday with their second-annual Family Math Night.
Last year was the first time the school invited students and parents to come and play math-related dice and card games, said Jody Bialowas, the school’s lead math teacher. It was a smash hit, with some 160 attendees filling the gym, so they’ve expanded this year’s event to the school’s library as well.
Muriel Martin teachers often hear from their junior high counterparts that students don’t know basic math skills, Bialowas said.
“In order to become fluent, the kids really need practice outside the school,” she said, practice some math-phobic parents may feel intimidated to provide.
Family Math Night teaches kids and parents fun math-related games they can use to practice at home, such as variants of War and Go Fish.
The event runs from 6 to 8 p.m. Jan. 19 at the school. Call 780-458-0205 for details.
