Wednesday was “Take Your Parent to PE” day at Natalie’s school. I showed up a few minutes late, which is nothing new. Natalie right away starting whispering ‘Mommy, Mommy!” and waving like a wild woman. She was sooo excited I came. “I thought you might not come,” she said as I slid into place beside her on the floor.
The gym teacher seemed on the ball. He took us through the instructions for the first game – a picture scavenger hunt played in teams. We ran from item to item out in the school yard as we tagged everything on the picture list.
Then we came inside to play two different versions of freeze tag. The first one had a story to go with it. Mr. B said, “Okay, some of you may have played this before, but let me read the story for the parents.” At the word story many of the kids made murmured excitedly. “I love this game,” Natalie oohed under her breath. She continued making faces and sounds the whole way through the story.
“A long time ago, before dinosaurs roamed the earth, there were two types of creatures: wizards (Natalie looks at me with wide eyes) and grealings (Natalie looks at me and smiles). The wizards were sedentary creatures who stayed in their caves all day talking about philosophical ideas (big frown). The grealings were energetic creatures who played outside and got at least 60 minutes of exercise every day of the week and ate their vegetables (gives me the thumbs up). The grealings annoyed the wizards greatly with all their energy and running around so the wizards decided to freeze them all with their magic wands.” (raises her eyes and smiles knowing it time for the game to start)
That’s the story. The game is that three or four of the kids have ‘wands’ – pool noodles cut down to a little shorter than a baseball bat. They run around chasing the other kids who are grealings. When the grealings are tagged, they freeze in their spot until two grealings come and work as a team to unfreeze them. Mr. B switched up the type of running we did by having us skip, side-step and gallop.
We also played a form of freeze dodge ball where you everyone was running around throwing small foam balls at other player’s backs. If you felt a ball hit your back, you were frozen until someone came and unfroze you by giving you a ball.
Both games were a ton of fun… especially since Natalie didn’t want to leave my side. We ended up being a team a lot of times. It was cute to see her competitive side and see her deliberately try to get other people frozen during the second game.
I didn’t know what to expect so was pleasantly surprised how fun the gym teacher made it for the parents. He stressed movement, teamwork, and good sportsmanship. But what I’ll remember most of all is Natalie’s excitement… her grin when we unfroze someone and her grin when she got someone out.
(c) 2016 Leighann Marquiss
Comments (2)
I love this story! Natalie is so cute and it sounds like so much fun.
-katie
Finally catching back up to your blog (and everything else, seemingly…) after being MIA for a while!
You know, that is a pretty awesome game. The only part that kind of annoys/disturbs me is the negative association with sitting around “discussing philosophical ideas.”
I get that the point is to encourage physical activity instead of a sedentary lifestyle, but couldn’t they have avoided the negative attitude toward discussing philosophical ideas? We have enough hatred of the arts and letters in this country.
Am I stretching here? I really don’t feel like I am. I think these furtive messages are in fact the most dangerous. Thoughts?