GUILDERLAND — Gym class today is a whole new ballgame.

Decades ago, physical education centered largely on team sports, starting in elementary school and continuing through the end of high school. Classes broke into two teams — often starting with the dreaded choosing of teammates — and then played kickball, basketball, volleyball, softball, or soccer. Gymnastics was a rare exception to the team play.

These days, elementary-school phys. ed. at Guilderland doesn’t involve team sports at all, until kids reach fifth grade, when these sports are introduced, in modified forms designed for success.

Gym class in the younger grades now starts from concepts rather than activities, said Regan Johnson, Guilderland’s director of health, physical education, and athletics. It start from the idea of building skills needed for physical fitness and for life — such as eye-hand coordination, balance, or reaction time — through activities taught every year and gradually introducing more difficult activities, Johnson said.

One of these is circus skills.

Kids in the younger grades are taught to “juggle” using light and airy scarves.

As students get older and begin to master the pattern of how their hands are supposed to move to keep things in the air, classes introduce juggling gradually heavier objects such as foam balls, small beanbags, tennis balls, or even “goofy things” like rubber chickens, said Johnson.

Likewise, starting out, kids might learn how to balance a peacock feather on their finger, or to spin a plastic plate on the end of a stick. Later they might learn to balance heavier items like a wiffleball bat or broomstick on a palm or a finger.

Some schools have unicycles, Johnson said.

Kids can also progress to combining more than one activity at once, like learning to juggle while walking on stilts, or dribbling a basketball — and maybe even taking a shot — while walking on top of a three-foot-tall, carpet-covered wire wheel.

Many of the concepts being taught are useful equally for team sports, which are introduced gradually from about fifth grade, and for activities like driving a car or crossing a street, said Johnson.

When classes do start to introduce team sports, they build on skills students have been developing over the years, Johnson said, such as tracking the movement of a ball or using eye-hand coordination. Activities are sometimes modified slightly, to allow kids a higher chance of success and to give them confidence. For instance, said Johnson, games can be shortened, and basketball nets lowered.

Options

At the middle school, students begin to have optional activities that they can choose, with a larger percentage of time devoted to optional activities each year. Options include fencing, yoga, self-defense (which incorporates martial arts), archery, pickleball, indoor lacrosse, and gymnastics.

One reason for selecting these particular activities, Johnson said, is that they are suited to lifelong fitness. By exposing students to a variety of activities, district officials hope to plant the seed of interest that may carry them, as adults, into spare-time activities like touch football teams or yoga classes that will help them stay active and fit.

“We have a lot of kids, for instance, who took fencing in middle school and who are still fencing, as adults,” John said.

In 11th and 12th grades, according to Johnson, options available include snowshoeing, golf, and bowling.

One of the first units taught to all students in sixth-grade physical-education class, Johnson said, is Adventure Education, which involves lower and higher climbing elements, so that students can “challenge by choice,” if they want to, and  overcome at their own pace any fear of heights that they may have.  Johnson said that this unit teaches students to “take calculated risks, risks that are safe, and to trust in other people.”

The highest element, Johnson said, is an outdoor zipline that goes 300 feet, 25 feet up. One of the lowest is an incline ladder that starts out on the ground and goes, at the other end, about 10 feet up. Students do not use belay ropes on the lower elements, he said, although they do wear helmets, and teachers constantly emphasize the need for safety on these elements, too.

“When we have injuries in Adventure Education, it’s always on the lower elements,” Johnson said, noting that, if kids fool around on these, they can sometimes get hurt, even while using helmets and mats.

There is an indoor mini zipline that is very popular with the students, Johnson said; he invented it about 15 years ago. Students climb a ladder, while belayed, and jump off and travel across the width of the gym while being lowered to the ground. They land on four-feet-tall foam mats, where they try to knock over a set of large foam bowling pins with their feet. “Kids love it,” Johnson said.

See a photo gallery of sixth-grader Ella Tuxbury taking a leap.

When students are nervous, teachers sometimes encourage them to climb to the spot where they think they cannot go any further, and then take one more step,” said Johnson. He added, “We try to push through that boundary. And what better metaphor could there be for life?”

At the middle-school level, teachers hold the ropes for individual climbers, who are also seated in a harness and stabilized with a caribiner. Middle schoolers don’t hold ropes for each other one-on-one, he said, although a group of middle-schoolers will sometimes do this for a climber.

“In the moment”

Johnson said that he has been with the district for 21 years, and that this program was introduced shortly before that, by teacher Bob Oates. Since then, it continues to change to reflect student interests, he said. For instance, the Adventure Education ropes course has been greatly expanded, he said, and the martial arts unit has been modified to do away with kata, or choreographed patterns of movements, which kids thought were boring, and to focus on self-defense and getting out of holds or responding to attacks.

Another thing that kids in the elementary grades sometimes practice in phys-ed class, Johnson said, is “being in the moment.” They need that, he said, given the amount of time that people, including young children, spend these days looking at screens. “Some teachers,” he said, “have kids doing deep breathing.” This is helpful for many students, he said, particularly as the state exams approach.

Some classroom teachers also incorporate deep breathing into their classroom activities, he said. Classrooms also tend, these days, he said, to have a variety of seating options designed to let students learn while feeling physically comfortable: there are a number of physio balls in classrooms for students who might prefer them over chairs.

There are even a few standing stations, he said; all of these options are designed to let kids decide what kind of seating — or standing — will best help them to concentrate.