On Thursday, after spending a day with my Grade 6/7 practicum class, I had an interesting moment of reflection – when you’re learning, it’s far easier to focus on your mistakes than to notice your successes.

I had a lesson planned for PE that was going to focus on defence and offence skills.  I did the warm-up activity for the lesson, which went well, and was going to split the kids into teams to play a skills building game when the class started all talking at once saying “We have teams already! We’ve been playing basketball games all week!”  This surprised me since in their previous volleyball unit they did not get to playing full games until many more weeks into the unit, so I asked them what they had learned so far in their basketball games.  They were able to explain several rules and things they had learned to me.  I had learned on my 2 week practicum that sometimes you have to be flexible when the students have a strong interest in something, as you’ll lose them if you try to make them do an activity that they’re not in to.  So with these empowered thoughts I said, “Sure!  Let’s play some basketball!” Continue reading →