'Rocking out' in gym class
By: Jessica Selby 02/18/2006


Forget about tag, jump rope and dodge ball, gym class just isn't what it used to be.
The new rage in physical education in the Valley is rock climbing.
Several of the elementary schools and the all of the middle schools have traverse climbing walls. A traverse climbing wall runs horizontally rather than vertically. There are various colored pegs secured onto the wall for climbers to stretch and reach for as they try to get across without dropping to the ground.
This style of wall, Jan McMahon, the physical education teacher at Knotty Oak Middle School said, suggested as more beneficial for use in schools because it doesn't require the users to wear safety ropes as the walls are only 3 and a half feet off of the ground and, odds are, most schools do not have a space that is tall enough to run the wall vertically.
The traverse wall at Knotty Oak Middle School stretches 40 feet long and 10 feet high across the length of a wall in the gymnasium.
"The idea of the traverse wall is to give the students that feeling of being challenged with climbing, but if they get nervous, they just have to step down," McMahon said. "They are never more than 3 and a half feet off of the floor and there are 8 foot wide mats underneath them."
The real challenge with the rock wall, McMahon said, is that the students have to "try to stay real close to it in order to stay up." In order to maintain that position, "they have to use muscles in their forearms and fingers that they seldom use."
In a letter sent home with students for parents to sign before they were allowed to use the rock climbing wall, the physical education department explained that "indoor rock climbing is one of the fastest growing activities today. It simultaneously develops coordination, strength, flexibility and cardiovascular fitness. Additionally, important life skills like problem solving, goal setting, perseverance, inner confidence and patience will be used in this unit."
"We use the rock wall during our team building unit because, with all of the team building activities we do, this allows the students the opportunity to focus more on their individual strengths," McMahon said. "We time them as they go across, ask them to use only certain colored pegs and even insert obstacles on the course to make it more challenging as they advance in their abilities."
Kayla White and Nicole Zompa, both eighth graders at Flat River Middle School, said that the rock climbing wall is a challenging exercise.
"It takes a lot of upper body strength that we don't use very much," White said. "It makes reaching for the next peg really tough."
As beneficial as the rock climbing walls are for exercise, they do not come cheap, McMahon said. It took the students, faculty, staff, parents and administration at Knotty Oak Middle School almost three years to raise the $3,500 it cost to purchase the traverse wall for the school.
"We only get a whopping $400 a year from the budget to spend in our department so it took us a couple of years to raise the money for the wall," McMahon said. "We tried all different kinds of products, but with all the fund raisers going on in the school, it was really tough to raise the money and then the PTSA offered to gave us half."
"That was huge for us and then, on top of that, our maintenance department was short-handed and couldn't find the time or the manpower to put it up, so the PTSA gave us an additional $1,000 to have the wall installed," she said.
Tiogue Elementary School in Coventry recently received a $4,000 grant from Rep. Raymond Sullivan (D-Dist. 29) to fund the purchase of its rock wall.
Flat River Middle School in Coventry has a traverse rock wall, which the school raised funds for over a period of time and Deering Middle School in West Warwick also has a transverse wall.