Here are some of the documents used for the 2011 marathon.

I have never been more proud of our students than on race day! Temperatures of 47 degrees, wind, and rain didn't deter our little athletes from making their way downtown and lining up on the starting line. They were freezing and wet, but they hardly complained. They finished the race and we are incredibly proud of them!

We are in full swing of marathon preparations as well as testing and everything else. We have the bus reserved, the T-shirts ordered, the schedule made and it still seems like there is something that we are forgetting. Our kids are doing a wonderful job!

Without fail the weather turns cold when we want to go outside for a run. We had our monthly Saturday training run and were fortunate enough to meet up with an adult group who was also training for the marathon. I was so proud of our students for implementing proper running etiquette. They were polite and encouraging to everyone we met and always waved as they saw another runner approaching. I was so proud of their perseverance as they logged 4 miles in the cold and wind. Students from East Side, a neighboring elementary school, joined us and we had a wonderful time.

This year we decided to incorporate a long run one Saturday per month to encourage bonding among our participants. Last Saturday, in the fog and cold, our students met at Regional Park for a four mile training run. I was so incredibly proud of them for persevering through the elements. We met many friendly people who were also training for distance events. Many of them asked about our group. One sweet woman who walks the trails multiple times a day said that it was good to see children on the course laughing and talking. I was so pleased that other people had the opportunity to see our children in action.

Special thanks to the multiple parents who stayed to help and to our marathon sponsors!

Well, we are ready to begin our 2011 marathon experience! This year, we have expanded our program and another school in the district will be joining us in this adventure. We had a morning informational meeting earlier this week in which we gave the students the following:

Race Course (printed from OKC memorial website)

Running Log (printed from OKC memorial webste)

School Traning Calendar (outlining the dates and times for our weekly and weekend training runs)

Permission Form (District document for all students participating in athletics)

We have also garnered the support of out PTA and they are actively working on donations for our t-shirts and signs. Thank you PTA!!!!!!! Two companies have submitted T-shirt art for us and we are ready to go with ordering the T's.

We look forward to a wonderful marathon season.

Here are the 5th Grade Skills checklists. These are based off of the OCCT Test blueprints and PASS objectives. You may want to change some of the skills to match up with your testing data. I am putting both the Word Perfect and Word versions here.



4th Grade is next!

I forgot to put the other two third grade charts up. I work in Word Perfect, which is how the first two are saved. I have converted them to Word, which is what these two are.

I've attached the third grade reading and math skills checklists. These are based on the testing blueprints for the OCCT test.

Christine and I had a great time presenting R3 to participants at the Encyclomedia conference. Thanks for stopping by to talk with us!

We had a wonderful time last night at the Midwest City-Del City Public Schools Foundation Investment in Excellence Dinner. The Foundation is imperative to our work inside and outside of the classroom. We thank them for their generosity and leadership.

As we begin to plan for the 2011 marathon, we have many additions to our marathon planning committee. We couldn't do this work without a great group of faculty, administration, and parent volunteers. Our group includes:

Mrs. Hamilton- principal

Mr. Porter- P.E. teacher

Mr. & Mrs. Fields- parents

Ms. Erickson- Reading Specialist

Ms. Paradise- 3rd grade team

Mrs. Ross- 1st grade team

Mrs. Brown- 2nd grade team

Ms. Warrior- Advanced Learning Teacher

Mrs. Friend- District Instrucional Facilitator

Mrs. Wilson- District Advanced Learning Coordinator

Dr. Wilson- District Technology Coordinator

We would like to express our sincere gratitude to the Pay it Forward fund. They have graciously agreed to cover the admission fee for our students to visit the Oklahoma City National Memorial &Museum. We couldn't be more thrilled as this will provide such a rich learning experience for our students.

The Oklahoma City National Memorial is a wonderful resource. Please check their website for more information at www.oklahomacitynationalmemorial.org

Destiny

I came across this article this morning: http://healthyamericans.org/reports/obesity2010/release.php?stateid=OK .

It places Oklahoma as the 6th most obese state in the nation. I am so sad to be a part of that statistic! It makes me more committed to this program, because it is a step toward reducing the obesity rate in our kids and our teachers. It's a battle, and it's one we have to win. We need to start teaching these kids how to live a healthy lifestyle, and we need to start modeling that to them.

Here is the question - how do we include this type of training/curriculum into our classroom? Where does it fit? How do we introduce them to healthy eating habits as well as an active lifestyle?

I mentioned this in an earlier entry, but I plan on going through this entire challenge with my kids. All the physical training and all the reading and math challenges. My chart will be right up there with theirs. I've even purchased "Algebra II for Dummies" and the accompanying workbook so I have new math skills to learn with them. The reading will be easy. Now....let's get together and work on the physical fitness part!

Christie

I've been reading a lot of books recently that talk about what we model to the kids. We all know it is important, but what do we do about it? In this case, I know we do a good job with the reading and math. However, what about the physical fitness part? I know I don't show the kids much in this area. So, how do we accomplish this? What can we do next year with this program to show that we as teachers are as dedicated to fitness as we want them to be? I can tell them "it's hard, but do it anyway" all I want to, but I'm not showing them. Looks like I've got some training to do! Any ideas on how to show the kids what I'm doing? Or for that matter, any ideas on what I should be doing. :D How to get other teachers involved and committed? How to make this part of the R3 program?

Christie

A couple of days ago, a person interested in doing the R3 program at his school asked me about some of the lessons that we highlighted during our training/tutoring sessions. I thought I would write about some of them in this blog. We felt that during this program we were not only training our bodies, but also working to train our minds and develop some mental toughness. Feel free to use them if you would like.

Difficult doesn't mean Bad

For many of our students if a task is difficult it instantly becomes bad, evil, gross, and a whole host of other negative words. In our program we tried to stress that just because running could be difficult at times, did not mean that it was bad. It was just difficult. Nothing more, nothing less. At every opportunity we redirected our students when this would come up. So while running, we would approach a new distance by saying this may be difficult, and it may be hard, but that doesn't mean that it is bad and that we can't or shouldn't try it. In academics we encouraged the same line of thought. The new math concept may be difficult, and I may have to work really hard, but the concept itself isn't bad and just because I am having difficulty with the concept doesn't make me a bad math student.

I can't believe we are planning next year's marathon already, but here we are! Destiny covered some of what we talked about at our last meeting - mainly those things that look back on what we've done. My job is to cover the part that looked forward.

First of all, we decided to try and find some sponsors to cover the cost of the bus, t-shirts, etc. The Foundation grant this year helped with our costs, which was terrific! Now we need to see if we can get some community support to help us out next year. If you know anyone who might be interested (or are willing to help yourself!), please let us know.

The second big thing we decided was to get started earlier and communicate progress more often. We've decided to try for a big kickoff at the end of August, with the beginning of at least the reading and math parts at the beginning of September. We're looking for a way to make it easy for teachers to help us keep track of the pass skills learned. We are also trying to figure out a good way to post the progress for everyone to see. Some ideas we are kicking around are: a "road" with mile markers on the gym wall where we could put stickers or some other tag for each child's completion of a reading, math or running task; thermometers to indicate class completion of the tasks; continuing with the journals we did this year. We haven't come up with an idea yet that made us say "this is the one!" so we'll keep working on it.

We also want to start getting parents and other community members involved in the training/tutoring. It was difficult to organize tutoring with just the two of us and so many grade levels. Extra people would be great. This might be something we could get high school students involved in as well. Maybe we can set up a mentoring kind of thing.

Christie

• Great opportunity for the students to participate in an event with the larger community.
• An opportunity for students to join the “club”of scholar-athletes.
• Family friendly event
• Focus on API goals
• A model of high expectations

I'm working on a podcast of our experience, but here's a couple of pics from the day of.