Featured PE Teacher – Sandra Hagenbach

This week for the Featured PE Teacher section on the PE Central Facebook page, the spotlight is on Sandra Hagenbach!

Myself and some students from my FUTP60 team at a Packer game which we attended by winning a contest

About Sandra:

I am a Physical Education teacher at Heritage Elementary School in De Pere, Wisconsin. I teach Kindergarten through fourth grade, and we have about 500 students at my school. I’ve been teaching for over 30 years! I love to integrate classroom literacy with physical literacy. And my favorite part about being a PE teacher is seeing a student smile when they are successful.

Current Lesson Plan/Unit:

We teach a Nutrition Unit and then have “Heart Week”. Heart Week consists of a full gym Circulatory System obstacle course that teaches the circulatory system and heart health. Our Nutrition Unit emphasizes the concepts of Whoa-Slow-G0 foods, Energy IN=Energy Out and the number of servings needed a day from the MyPlate food groups for older students. Younger students concentrate on identifying the food groups and eating a balanced diet from all the food groups. The older students get to use the app Eat & Move O’Matic which helps teach the concept of Energy In=Energy Out.  Younger students have fruit, vegetable, grain and protein bean bags to sort and catch as they learn about the food groups.

Heart Week consists of the Circulatory System obstacle course and a classroom element. The unit is based on the AHA poem “You can have a healthy heart. It is as easy as 1-2-3. Eat healthy stuff, move around enough and live tobacco free.”

Classroom activities include:

• Kindergarten – Learning the poem with actions, how the heart pumps (water bottle and bucket of water), what are aerobic activities, graphing favorite aerobic activity
• First grade – Learning a food group poem/dance, playing food group bingo (underhand throw of a fruit or vegetable beanbag into a laundry basket earns a food picture), drawing their favorite healthy snack on a heart and posting it on a bulletin board.
• Second grade – Learning about heart rate, comparing slow heart rate and fast heart rate with a partner using stethoscopes and pulse sticks.
• Third grade – Dangers of smoking (required health lesson)
• Fourth grade – Circulatory system (chambers of the heart, blood vessels)

Focus for 2018:

We are required to have Personal Professional goal.  My goal this year was to create a website that would help parents help their children with physical literacy and fitness.

The Art, Music and PE departments had a family curriculum night entitled Art With Heart and a Beat. The skill posters developed for the website were posted in the gym at each station and I handed out information on accessing the website to parents.