PE, ELL students and SPELTAC

It seems that there has been discussions outside of the PE department about how PE should be engaging in SPELTAC. It seems these views are pretty polar and range from ‘PE has nothing to do with literacy’ to ‘PE should be doing lots more written work and helping the students in the writing process’.

When we as a PE department created our inquiry question, it was focussing on how we could develop strategies that would enable English Language Learners (ELL) students to access our unique curriculum and associated physical outcomes.

Physical Education classes are according Clancy and Hruska (2005), in a great position to help ELL students to develop as they potentially they can support ELL students in their language development. Some of these characteristics include:

– Lots of interaction with other students – our students are and playing with others most of the time and talking in class is actively encouraged.

– There are many ways in which information is presented – we talk, physical demonstrate, as well as offering visual reminders.

– Students physical interact with language

-ELL students can succeed in our class independent of their ability to speak English

-Students can physical demonstrate their language comprehension

-Play situations often create lower stress environments for ELL students to practise their emerging language

Our goal as a department is keep looking for and developing strategies to help ELL students reach success in PE.

Reference
Clancy, M. & Hruska, B. (2005). Developing Language Objectives for English Language Learners in Physical Education Lessons. Journal of Physical Education Recreation and Dance, 76(4), 30-35.  – See more at: http://www.supportrealteachers.org/strategies-for-english-language-learners.html#sthash.iySKulnZ.dpuf (http://www.supportrealteachers.org/)

Implementing Gibbons Intellectual Practices during Invasion Games

The older students in Elementary PE have been participating in an Invasion Game Unit, which involves many of Gibbons (2009) intellectual practises being implemented.

One of our culminating activities involved the students taking the knowledge that they  have already developed, regarding moving into space to receive the ball, built up in previous sessions through different types of games and use it to develop a simple attacking strategy that their team could use in a game of half court basketball. The students were undertaking a planning task, just like a coach would, rather than just being a player.

Students were asked to complete this task in small groups. This creates a situation where students are having to engage with each other in a substantive conversations. They would make a suggestion and have to justify it to others in the group. They also asked questions of one another. From the noise level in the gym, it was apparent that this task creates a great deal of discussion between the students.

Planning a strategy and communicating it to others, is not always easy. To assist the students in this process we use the coachnote app on ipads – which is not too dissimilar to the technology you see TV analysts using to talk about professional sports! This app allows students to make their thinking visible by being able to draw out the game and move players and ball around on the court, record the moves and then play them back.

An area to improve for future units will be to try to encourage the students to use the correct terminology, when explaining their strategies. The app, does let them become a little over reliant on just using simple language of “this goes here, this one here and that one goes here”. Watching back the animated moves that I had produced earlier in the unit to demonstrate some simple games they also fell into this category! Having said this, it was evident that the coachnote app really allowed many of the emerging language learners in the class fully demonstrate their ideas and not be restricted by their lack of language.

Video Feedback

One of the more challenging aspects of teaching high jump to Grade 4-5 students is helping some of the students work out which is their take-off foot. This year, we set up the High Jump in the gym and next to one of the high jump beds was an ipad on a tripod, connected to a projector. The ipad was using BAM app, which videos the action and then plays it back with a time delay chosen by the user.

Students performed their jump, got of the back of the mats and went to watch their jump. One of the students who had a broken arm, was there to help them work out if they were jumping off the correct leg, leaving me to work and provide feedback to other students.

This simple method dramatically increased the amount of feedback students received in a lesson!

My perfect class register with a Random Team Maker

Here is the link to the class register that I use everyday with my classes. It is a Google Sheet that I access on my macbook or iPad. It acts as my register for attendance, recording who forgot PE kit, recording assessment details and uses Flippity.net to create random teams. The original idea, which I have adapted came from freetech4teachers.com. 

Please feel free to make a copy of this register to use.


The attendance section has used conditional formatting to create coloured responses, so I can easily spot patterns of no attendance, or forgetting kit.

I have used data validation to create a quick basic pull down of criteria to record how students are doing on different criteria / standards.

The exciting part of the register, is that it uses flippity.net as a random name or team maker.
To do this I copy the students' first names into the penultimate sheet (tabs at the bottom of the google sheet). 

The next stage is to publish to the web, from the file menu.

Then copy the link, when published

The link is then pasted into the last sheet (tabs at the bottom of google sheets), where it tells you to. 

 Then it a case of clicking on link in blue, which opens up a new tab, giving you lots of choices - ie in pairs or into 4 teams and much more.

Remote App - Using an iPad to control a MacBook

Remote is the latest app that I found to be really useful in PE classes. I have eventually got round to transferring my music collection onto my school MacBook. With remote app, my iPad now becomes a remote controller for the MacBook, which is plugged into the speakers. Where ever I am in class, I can control the music - which makes musical statues much more interesting, as the kids don't stop every time I approach the stereo!

Involving everyone in creating Essential Agreements

At the start of the school, as part of the PYP we create Essential Agreements in all of our classes. These are statement that students in each class draw up and agree upon in order to learn best in PE.

Over the years the process I have used has changed. The first year I did this I started out with a set of Essential Agreements that I drew up and which all 12 of the classes I taught used. The wording was great and it used lots of Learner Profile and PYP Attitudes in it, but it was my work, that the students all nodded agreement too.

This has progressed over the years to Essential Agreements being student driven. I have had them all sit down as a group and make suggestions, which were then written up onto a board, where we could choose the best. I have also had students working in groups draw up lists and photographed them all and then combined onto one piece of paper.

One of the drawbacks of these methods, is that I feel, that the conversations have been dominated by the louder, more confident students, especially in our mixed grade level classes. So this year I tried something different and used Padlet and the student iPads. Padlet is a bit like putting sticking sticky notes on a wall, but without them being blown off into the puddles - we teach outside!

After a few minutes of silent thinking, Students found a partner and shared ideas. They then took an ipad and scanned a QR code, which took directed them to a padlet wall, set up in advance. Once there they typed their ideas of what we needed to do to learn best in PE, onto the padlet wall. As they were doing this, they could also see what the others were typing. Several students said that this helped them modify their ideas.

The final step in the process was looking at all the posts as a class and deleting duplicates and in some cases asking the authors of some posts to expand their ideas to the rest of the class, before choosing our agreements to keep. Then it was a simple case of taking a screenshot of the final product.

 Judging by the increased volume of posts on the wall this year, I believe that students were more happy sharing their ideas this way and it allowed the quieter students a much greater input into the discussion. Looking back at last year’s essential agreements, I also feel that the students thought about the agreements in more depth this year as the quality of suggestions was quite impressive.

Laser-beam guided swimming

I was reading an article the other day, and liked the idea of getting the swimmers to point with their middle finger to help them stop crossing the centre line and reduce the scissors effect on their kick, when swimming Front Crawl. This is something that quite a few of our younger swimmers do. 

 So I tried this idea with Grade 2&3 swimmers, with a small change. Out the end of their middle finger shone a laser beam, with the on/off switch being their belly button. Just in case you were wondering, you need to press it three times to get the red light. Most of the students, after turning it on, could see the laser beam, though some pressed it four times, which meant it went purple! 

 Next they partnered up in order to watch each others strokes and provide feedback. We do quite a lot of reciprocal teaching in swimming, and this is something they are good at. Person A stood in the shallow end, while person B swam directly towards them, aiming their laser beam at the centre of person A. Person A’s job was count the number of ‘hits’ and ‘misses’ and explain to person B why they were missing, i.e. reaching over the centre line, hands entering the water outside their shoulders or not stretching far enough to get to the centre line. 

 I was pleasantly surprised how popular this activity was. The students were fully engaged and activity went on for longer than I planned, as there was a great deal of motivation to score as few misses as possible.