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Journaling Topics for Winter Vacation

David Kahan

San Diego State University

New Year’s Resolutions: What are your NYR related to your health, diet, body, sport or recreational involvement?  What made you select them?  How easy/hard will they be able to keep?  What strategies do you have for keeping them?  If you break them, what backup plans do you have?

Personal Report Card: When you come back from vacation, it will be very close to report card time.  Using scores on previous assignments and exams and your understanding of physical education grading policies, what grade do you think you’ll earn?  Does this match the grade you had hoped to earn?  What do you think you should be graded on in physical education?  Why?

Activity Log: Predict how many days during vacation you’ll do some type of physical activity (PA).  Predict how many different types of PA you’ll do.  Predict how many minutes total of moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA, i.e., activity which makes one sweat or breathe hard most of the time) you’ll do.  Plan a menu of PA for your vacation—where, when, and with whom will you be physically active.  Record your results on the included spreadsheet.

Example.

December is Safety in Toys and Games Month: Perform a risk/safety assessment of the sports and recreational equipment you now have or may get over the holidays.  Are there any items that are unsafe?  How could you make them safer?  Or do you play unsafely?  Examples: Bicycle tires with worn tread or no reflectors; rollerblading without wrist pads or a helmet.

Nutritional Alchemy: Alchemy was the ancient practice of supposedly turning relatively worthless and ordinary materials into valuable materials (e.g., tin into gold).  Record all your holiday treat eating (e.g., egg nog, pumpkin or sweet potato pie, potato latkes) and using calorie tables on the Internet or books at the library, covert your treats into healthy gold-standard snack choices.  For example, one slice of sweet potato pie has as many calories as 4.5 apples.

Destination Activity:  Your environment may help or hinder your ability to do physical activity.  This is especially true when you go on vacation and may not have access to your regular assortment of equipment (e.g., basketballs, bicycle, healthclub) or you go from cold to warm climates (a help), from warm to cold climates (a hindrance to many, unless you’re going skiing, snowshoeing, etc.), from low to high elevations (initially, a hindrance), or from flat to hilly terrain (for most activities, a hindrance).  Using specific examples, write about how your out-of-town vacation helped or hurt your ability to do physical activity.  How did you feel (did you wish to be back home at certain times)? What would you do for physical activity if you had to live in your vacation destination permanently?

Superbowl and Madison Avenue: Watch the Super Bowl and record the commercials in sequence as they appear.  After the game, analyze the commercials by answering these questions: (a) What percentage were targeted to males, females, both? (b) What percentage of commercials depicted behaviors that ordinarily aren’t associated with physically active lifestyles (e.g., drinking, partying, unhealthful eating) (c) Which groups of people watching may be excluded from the messages the advertisers are selling?  (d) Which commercials were most effective in persuading you to buy something and why?

Bowling for Dollars: During vacation, a full slate of over 25 college football bowl games will be played in order to reward teams that won a majority of their games during the regular season and to crown a national champion.  To the best of your ability, explain the process of determining who the national champion is.  Do you agree with who the championship team is—why or why not?  Do you have your own system, possibly better, for determining a champion?