G2 Invasion Games

Grade 2 students have just started an invasion games unit in PE. To start with we played some beanbag slide. The lessons focused on more than just playing the game.

Students came up with team plans to be successful, and some used the coachnote app to explain to others basic strategies.

We also had a look at the concepts of  teamwork, fair play (being a good winner and a good looser) and dealing with conflict that can arise in these types of games.

Over the next few weeks, we will be applying these concepts to a variety of different invasion games, as well at practicing the motor skills needed to be successful in these games.

Athletics activities

Students from KG to G5 are participating in athletic units at present. While they are all focused on running, jumping and throwing, activities undertaken vary, based on the age level.

When we have been inquiring into how to throw and jump further and run faster, we have used technology to help us in different ways. Video performances on the iPads allow the students to watch themselves perform, which is especially useful in slow motion. We have used apps such as Huddle Technique to watch in slow motion and highlight what we are doing - just like on the TV sports programmes. Recording and providing peer feedback is a undertaken with the older grades. 

Grade 4 to demonstrate their knowledge, had great fun this week using Flipgrid to record video responses to the questions "How can you jump further?" or "What techniques do you use to  throw further?", .  They managed to create 37 instructional videos this week, so it looks like we have many future youtube stars in the making!

Leadership in PE

In Grade 4 the year starts off with a Cooperation Games / Adventure Challenge unit. It is integrated into the homeroom unit on Leadership. In class the students look at different leaders and their attributes while in PE we have been looking at the practical aspect of leadership, culminating with a two day trip full of group leadership activities.

This has been achieved by setting up a range of activities that require teamwork to complete. Before the activity a leader was chosen for each group. Instructions on how to complete the activity was given only to the leader - part of being a leader is having the ability to communicate.

As the activities were taking place we would take some timeouts, where the different group leaders would come together and review how the teams were doing and think about what they needed to do when they got back to the group. Rather than focus on the actual solution to the problem, we would look at the leadership issues, such as how to get everyone to share ideas or giving different people roles.

 

At the end of the unit students reflected on what they had learnt about leadership.

Creating Yoga stories in PE

In kindergarten student follow a unit of inquiry in the classroom all about expressing their imagination. In PE students integrated with this unit through dance, but mainly yoga.

The yoga section started with the students watching and participating in yoga stories from Cosmic Kids yoga. Each episode tells a different story, which is told through different yoga poses. After the story finished, we would try to remember and practice the different yoga moves used in the story, as some times in the story they went a little fast.

The next stage was for the students to use their imagination to create a yoga story. First up was deciding where to go on the imagination journey and record it on their storyboard, either by drawing or writing. Students then had to choose a form of transport to get there. The middle of the story involved what they saw, before having to come home.

 

Once the story was completed the students then started to use yoga to represent the different parts of the story. Students practiced telling the story to each other before we videoed the story in front of a green screen. Then the students got to choose a background to match their story, before the story and background were put together using a green screen app and we had our own yoga stories videos - just like cosmic kids!

Gamification of Catching and Throwing Practise

In preparation for an invasion game unit with Grade 1 students we have been practising throwing and catching skills - basic fundamental skills. I had a look through some of my resources and they all have some pretty dry catching and throwing activities, that are not the most motivating, but they involve students doing lots of throwing and catching which is what I want the students to do. With older grades I do lots of 'Games for Understanding' activities, but here I wanted lots of skill practise without the added pressure of a game.

So I decided to do a bit of gamification of this basic skills. "The gamification techniques are intended to leverage people's natural desires for socialising, learning, mastery, competition, achievement, status, self-expression, altruism, or closure"1. It should also involve some kind of reward - points; badges; or levels. 

In the catching and throwing challenge students worked in pairs. They started at one end of the gym with one of them sat on a trolly board holding a large foam ball. The other person pushed their partner to the throwing zone. Once there they had to complete one of two throwing and catching challenges. If they dropped the ball they had to start the throwing again. When they completed this they jump back onto the trolly board and went back to the start and switched over. When they had both completed level one, they could then progress to the next level, with a smaller ball. There were a set of levels to work through, each progressively harder, with the final level involving the students creating their own catching challenge. 

My observations from this activity, was that the use of levels to work through really motivated the students to work hard and the use of the trolly boards to get between the levels was also big hit! My aim was to get the students participating in lots of throwing and catching in an enjoyable way, which was certainly achieved. I feel that the use of levels also really encouraged the students to push themselves. In previous lessons, I felt that some students, despite the same choice of balls being available, were not really challenging themselves and were staying with what they knew they could achieve. This was definitely not the case in this lesson, where they wanted to work through the levels. 

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification

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From my reading, creating word walls is often listed as a strategy to help ELL students, which makes sense. However, I have questioned the value of creating a word wall for PE, especially when we often teach a class in a different location each week, and inside the gym, there is no space for displays. We have a shared portable white board which we have used to wheel out to classes and post words and concepts onto it, but this is not the most practical solution for creating even a semi-permeant word wall.

In the last few weeks we now have an Elementary PE notice board, placed outside the gym, next to where many students eat their morning snack. On this board we are creating a word wall. However, as it is not in our teaching environments and short of walking the students over to the board every time we want to point out a word, this particular wall requires the students to independently look at it. I wonder if just a list of words will really help ELL students in this situation?

One solution might be to make the wall more inviting to look at. Rather than just a list of words, for our athletics unit we are experimenting with a more images on the word wall. We are doing this by taking a photo of the equipment or the student performing an event, put the name the picture and underneath one teaching point that we have been using with the students. Hopefully as the students enjoy looking at pictures of themselves performing, they will go over to look at it. The next stage will be try to evaluate if the students are going to and looking at the wall.

Encouraging talking to help understanding in Individual Pursiuts

In PYP PE, Individual Pursuits are one the areas that should be offered to the students in a balanced curriculum (IB PYP PSPE Scope and Sequence).In our Elementary PE programme we offer Individual Pursuits through Athletics and Swimming.

Individual Pursuits are defined "activities in which participants work individually with their own equipment and monitor their own behaviour, movements and physical expenditure." (Playsports, OPHEA). Looking at this definition it might seem that they are not the best activities to encourage talking. Personal experience of teaching these activities over many years have shown that when teaching them it is often easy to fall into the mistake of relying on a command style of teaching to teach everyone the same thing and having too much teacher talk, as highlighted by Fisher, Krey and Rothenburg (2008).  Student talk is used only to check comprehension as opposed to develop thinking.

To encourage talking to help develop thinking in swimming and athletics I have used collaborative tasks. In swimming this has been achieved through reciprocal teaching. Students have worked with a partner and been asked to look at one aspect of a stroke and then provide their partner with feedback highlighting what they were doing well and one thing that needed to be improved. Before this happened students were given a demonstration and we talked through what makes a good stroke, in order to provide them with the language.

This year in athletics for G4 I took this further, using this unit outline. Working in twos and threes, students became experts in one event. In the first couple of lessons they were provided links to websites and short videos to help them develop their understanding, and they spent time practising the event and working out between them how they could teach it. After they had become the expert, they then had to teach it to the rest of the class through leading the rest of the students through the process of how to perform the event and then providing feedback to individuals as they practised the event.

G4 students providing instruction and feedback

The result of these approaches was that individual pursuits have become activities where there are lots of opportunities for students to talk and develop their language.