Warrior Wellness: First-semester highlights from Willowbrook’s physical education, health and driver education classes

Pictured is Mike Haussmann, Willowbrook Department Head for physical education, health and driver education.

Happy new year, and welcome back for the second semester here at Willowbrook. Our students are working hard every day to become more educated with their health and wellness, and we are thrilled to showcase those accomplishments through this monthly column.

We are very excited and look forward to all of the fun projects and activities planned for our classes this semester, but I would like to take a moment to reflect on last semester and share with you a few of our students’ successes.

Some of the great achievements our pupils reached this semester have to do with improvements to their physical fitness. For first semester, our students as a whole improved their fitness scores in the following categories.

As you can see, students put in the work to improve. Other accomplishments include our health classes starting an initiative to help their peers understand the concept of advocacy and using that in a mental health awareness campaign. Our health classes also learned about healthy nutrition choices by designing their own food trucks and developing healthy menus, where their classmates evaluated and voted on their favorite trucks.

Driver education is staying current by educating new drivers about Scott’s Law and increased penalties this year, as well as the implementation of the REAL ID Act and what it means to domestic travelers.

In physical education, our Leadership Training students created and led small-group fitness activities, worked on a number of teambuilding challenges and are gearing up to begin teaching their own developed Leadership Lessons.

Dance students created and implemented their own choreography to share with their classmates, while still having time for some good-old-fashioned Zumba!

These are just a few of the successes from first semester. Perhaps the best highlight I can share is this: 75 percent of students enrolled in physical education, health or driver education classes earned an A or B for first semester of the 2019-20 school year. Way to go, Warriors!

Wishing you a healthy 2020 and beyond.

- Mike Haussmann, Willowbrook Department Head for physical education, health and driver education

• The Warrior Wellness column provides an inside look into the physical education, health and driver education classes at Willowbrook. This feature will highlight what students are working on in the classroom, as well as student successes in those departments.