I encourage everybody and challenge everybody to strive towards their goals…. There will be ups and there will be downs, but just keep working towards them and don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do it’ – Catriona Le May Doan, Canadian Olympic Speed Skater 

Journal entry #9 – Group Teach 

Today was our last group teach class and it happened to be my group’s day to present. Going last was good in some ways, as we got to see 8 other examples of PE lesson plans, but also difficult as I felt there was a lot of pressure to do well. Moreover, because our focus was on health literacy it was a little bit more tricky to incorporate physical activities into the plan.

The basic plan of the class was:

  • review the readings in small groups of 7: we looked over chapters 14 & 16
  • do a ‘brain break’: I spread out a bunch of photos of children’s toys and asked my group to separate them into two separate hula hoops which represented ‘girls toys’ and ‘boys toys’. We then discussed this division and I asked them to improve the set up. Their improvement was to combine all the toys and stack the hula hoops on top of each other. We then discussed gender binaries and how they saw these at their practicum schools.
  • warm-up activity: a mannequin challenge which involved the leaders shouting out an activity and a number of people as the ‘students’ were walking around the gym (i.e. groups of 5 brushing their teeth). They would then have to scramble to find a group with the correct number of people & make a tableau of the activity. The last call was to make a whole group tableau of a school playground which we captured on film.
  • main activity: a jeopardy / trivia game. The students were divided into 2 groups and would have to bid on each question with a given number of exercises. At the beginning of the game we demonstrated how to do each exercise properly. If a team was unable to get the question right, the other team could steal it – but would first have to do the exercise.
  • cool down: organic stretching & self-assessment

What went well

  • the brain break: My group was very engaged and could have continued the conversation for much longer. This seems to be an area that a lot of teacher candidates are especially interested in.
  • the activities generally: The feedback I got from my peers was very positive. I think because this was a difficult week for us academically everyone enjoyed a bit of a quieter class. The activities that we had planned involved more team work than many of the other weeks, which also works well because we (as classmates) know each other very well now.

What we could improve on

  • getting students to be more active: During the warm-up we could ask the students to do different movements around the gym before calling out the tableaus. I.e. jog / hop / skip around the gym.
  • making the trivia game more lively: I think this could be done by having smaller groups. We could have also made it a race and had people running up to answer questions.