April 2019 Newsletter

KU PAAC-3 Study

Thank you for all your hard work in delivering the PAAC intervention. We know finding time to fit in activity minutes can be a challenge with the hectic school schedule. The goal for PAAC is to deliver 20 minutes of classroom physical activity per day or 100 minutes per week. Don’t be discouraged if you are only able fit 10 minutes in on a given day. All activity counts and any minutes delivered help us determine the best way to increase physical activity levels in schools. To help motivate students and visually display daily and weekly activity minutes, we dropped off dry erase posters to the 2nd and 3rd grade classrooms. Please let us know your thoughts on the posters, any ways to improve them in the future. Your opinions are very valuable to us and we welcome any feedback. Please email Jeff Honas jhonas@ku.edu.

Teacher Highlight

We noticed a few teachers meeting the activity goals consistently and thought it could be useful to share a few of the tips they shared with us.

Stephanie Brachtenbach

Harmony Elementary School

She sets a time every day between math and spelling for the activity break and this helps keep the class on track. She also selects a student who was the most focused during the physical activity to write down the minutes. Following the physical activity, Stephanie likes to show a calming video prior to starting spelling.

Kari Edmunds

Harmony Elementary School

“One thing that really helped me get started was scheduling a time in my day where I know a break is needed. This time is during our morning block. Scheduling it the same way as I would for math, science, etc. helped me integrate it into our day and was a good reminder that I had another tool in my toolbox to use as needed during other times of the day. Now that it’s part of our day, I can vary the time based on daily activities.”

Why do we do it?

Study While visiting with teachers last semester we received questions on the activity monitor belts and thought we should share information about why we use the activity monitors and what they measure. The activity monitor measures the minutes and intensity of activity across a 7 day period during the fall semester and the spring semester. They do not collect information about location or have any Wi-Fi or Bluetooth capabilities. They function in some of the same ways a step counter functions by counting steps but use an accelerometer to measure more accurately the overall activity levels (time of day, duration and intensity of activity) and sedentary time during the weekday, weekend, at home and during school. Using this information we can determine the most popular time during the school day teachers perform physical activity breaks in the classroom and the intensity level of the activity.

Tips to get kids moving!

There are many ways to get your student involved in physical activity

  • Have a reward each week for the class that records the most minutes in the school
  • Have a contest between classrooms in the same grade or between grades
  • Pick a star student of the week that gets to choose the video or lead the classroom activity
  • Encourage kids to get involved by highlighting the hardest worker by having them write down the minutes of activity breaks performed each day of the given week.
Average Minutes per Day by School Graph

If you have any questions or concerns please contact:

Jeff Honas (jhonas@ku.edu)

Kim Johnson (kim@ku.edu)