REFLECTION

Movement Journal

This Wednesday, my group and I had the pleasure of being the first Team Teach participants for the class. We had the chance to teach Target Sports to the class.

Aside for the hustle and bustle of setting up our lesson plans and making sure we had all the required equipment, teaching my first P.E class was much more than I expected. My team did four activities. First, we played Chain Tag, then we played Apple Tree, then Tossing Game, and lastly finishing stretches for the cool down. I oversaw the Apple Tree activity, including the instructions and the clean-up. I had so much fun running the activities for the class, I even wished I had the chance to participate in some of them (especially Chain Tag!).

What worked for us was setting up the equipment beforehand, and making sure that everything was organized for convenient access. Perhaps in a smaller class, it wouldn’t be safe to lay out the equipment beforehand due to safety concerns. Another thing that worked was having the team mates who were not instructing perform equipment tasks – such as set up or clean up. Also, organizing the class into teams that could be applied from activity to activity helped the lesson go smoother. It was also very helpful to have the Lesson Plan prepared ahead of time. Instead of winging it, you have already thought about everything that could possibly happen ahead of time. We had extra activities, as well as adaptations for different players.

A few things I noticed was how extremely fast the time went. We had many things planned in a very short amount of time. I felt that if we made the activities more concise and shorter, we would have had more time for everything instead of being rushed.

The ‘students’ in our class were wonderful. They responded to questions, and were attentive when the teacher required their attention. Perhaps in a real P.E class, this will be more difficult. However, they had fun, could understand the premise of the lesson, as well as contribute to reflective questions at the end of class.

For next time, I would definitely attempt to change the times allocated for each activity to make it more realistic for the class. Time went by too fast and I felt that we were rushed, even though we managed to get through everything. Also, I will personally ask the students if they have any questions before we start the activity.

We had a blast!

Anna.