Crestview PE Teacher Ben Wade has been a PE teacher at Frenship for 14 years, and each year around this time he likes to transform his gym into a fun, glow-in-the-dark obstacle course for students to enjoy during their PE class.

Read the Q&A below with Coach Wade to learn more about how the obstacle course makes an impression on his students each year:

Q: What kinds of exercises and challenges does your Halloween obstacle course involve?

To start off, kids will do either a log roll or front roll on the first mat, after that they have to go under a structure and do an army crawl or bear crawl, they will then step through the tires, and when they get to the middle there are seven bones with their team number on the bottom. They will get one chance to find a match for their team, if they don’t find a match, they get to go onto the witches hat ring toss. If they make the ring around the witches hat, they get one more chance to try to find a match in the bone pile. If they don’t find a match, they will run back to their team and give the next person a high five so they can go through the course. Before being able to complete another run through the course, they must complete two laps around the gym.

Q: Besides traditional exercise what are they able to learn with this obstacle course?

The bones are labeled with their team number, but throughout the year we discuss the bones of the body and what they are called. Many of them are able to recognize the bones, even some of my first graders, and are able to call them by name. We go over the clavicle, sternum, ribs, etc. We will have a word of the week that I put up on our skeleton and I can get to where I just point, and the kids can tell me what bone it is.

The kids are also practicing working as a team. They are relying on each other to find a match and bring it back to their team so that the next person can go.

Q: Why is it important to incorporate these types of fun activities for the kids throughout the year?

We started talking about the obstacle course on Friday of last week and showing them a video of how this works and they have just been so excited about it. I always just try to do something memorable for the kids each year and this is something totally different that will leave an impression on them and make physical exercise fun.