I’m excited to announce that we launched our brand new jump rope curriculum at the Oklahoma AHPERD conference on Monday! I was invited to teach a workshop session for the PE teachers that were in attendance (along with a number of students from the University of Central Oklahoma). I love hanging around PE Teachers since they tend to be a rather high energy group to start with and they’re as passionate about physical activity as I am. I took the opportunity to teach them some of the activities that we cover in our jump rope curriculum that is now available here at Jump Rope Secrets.

To start with, we ran through some warm-up activities that can be done with or without a jump rope. I then focused on teaching a few basic skills that they could teach to their students in PE class. The most popular skill students want to learn is the criss-cross so I made sure to go over that. I like to focus on the mechanics of things so we broke down each skill into bite sized steps that they could easily incorporate in their class. This is the same method of teaching that I use for all of our instructional videos here at the site.

After we covered some single rope skills, we went into some ideas that can be used for stations. In case you don’t use that term often, stations are where you break your classroom up into 4 (for instance) quarters and have a different activity at each one. Your students then rotate through them as part of the class. This is one of the focus points that we go over thoroughly in our jump rope curriculum. The stations that we covered on Monday were partner jumping, long rope and Double Dutch. Double Dutch is always the most popular station and we ended up spending most of the time working on turning drills and then letting different teachers have a chance to try jumping.

Tuesday morning the conference had their annual big meeting on the state of things. The president of OAHPERD asked me to put on a 15 minute jump rope show while people were coming in. I had a great time giving them an idea of what you can do with a jump rope. Even veteran PE Teachers are amazed at what you can do with years of practice. Since I perform in schools for a living it was also a great chance to help them see what a show could look like if they are able to bring me out to their school later in the year.

I thought the launch went great and I was excited to share the new jump rope curriculum with the awesome PE teachers here in Oklahoma!