Today’s topic for Physical Education was “The ‘what’ and ‘how’ of teaching physical education.

At the beginning of the class, Steve, our instructor talked to us about how there are different phases of settling down.

I think I am beginning to settle down a little bit, not as much as I expected but I think I am settling in.

I have been working part-time as a private tutor and will be done with it by the end of September, but I think this really took some time out of my hands during the settling in time for me in the program.

My Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays were quite busy because of the work, and I felt like I was crunched with time, especially our third week when we had some assignments due for our classes.

Thankfully, because this week did not have any assignments to hand in, I think I took a breather and was able to catch up with some readings, although I still do have some more catching up to do with it.

Today was quite helpful because it really broke down the steps into how we should approach the class with an activity.

It was not just about doing an activity from a big topic, but rather from a particular topic, focusing on a particular movement within that topic was something that was really important to learn.

I think being able to zoom into specific movement and expanding from such movement to more complex and eventually maybe achieving to the level of our big topic is really helpful in guiding the students and also getting them to really engage in the physical activities for the day.

For example, the ‘what’ would be some sort of fundamental movement within a topic, such as gymnastics.

My group came up with the fundamental movement of balancing for the ‘what’ section of the lesson, and described how we are going to approach this movement and eventually become more comfortable in doing such activity.

What I really liked about this particular strategy is that we begin with very rudimentary activity but also a fundamental element in a gymnastic setting.

Then after when the students get the sense of what they are doing, does not matter if they were able to do it well the first time or not, it was very nice to go over some refinements that we can make to the more rudimentary and a broad skill set.

Then we went on to simplifying the activity so that the students would be able to practice the refinements and also after that, they can extend it even further into different types of positions while balancing, such as lifting the legs up or move them to a different position, and also to make it even more difficult, make the students to do it without looking.

I think the most important part about learning here is application. Even if we accomplish doing all the activities listed above, if we cannot use it, it becomes useless and I think making sure that the students feel like they have learned something that are useful can be very powerful in maintaining motivations in students for PE class.

That is it for todays’ HOPE journal

Today’s session of physical education was mainly about physical literacy and how we could provide physical literacy experience to the students that we will be teaching.

As we discussed in our class, we agreed that physical literacy is about the being able to engage in various physical activities with competence and confidence. This not only benefits self-esteems of the students but their overall health and lifestyle in general.

The main question is, how do we implement this into classrooms and help students to achieve certain amount of physical literacy?

I think the word “brain break” stood out the most throughout the discussions today and I assume that it was also the case for many other teacher candidates as well as they were also talking about how they agreed that it could really help out with helping students to focus more in whatever they are doing.

I think “brain breaks” can be very useful in implementing physical activities into the classroom even when it is not a P.E. class setting. Just simple things like stretching or walking outside for 5 minutes can be a “brain break”. I think as a teacher candidates, we can also use these to make it into habit for students to try it for themselves outside of school as well.

However, more importantly within the physical education class, it is crucial that the teacher guides the students into a environment where physical activity is fun and also helpful and beneficial in many areas. Without this, P.E. class will only become a place of games and sometimes a place of competition where people will be judged by there individual capacity and skills of a physical activity.

I think many good discussions have been going around today as well.

Today was our second week of the Physical education session. Our first mini-assignment for today was to create a 5 minute lesson for the class that the class could do with little or no equipments.

My partner Trevor and I prepared a simple lesson of up-down-stop-go where we would shout out the instruction and the students would perform the activity. The point was to clearly deliver the instruction and also provide a fun and simple activity to get everyone going with physical activity. I felt that simpler the activity, the better it was to get others to start moving. However, we later changed the instruction a little bit to make a variation (up-down, go-stop instructions are reversed. i.e.. one must go “up” when “down” is instructed.

We then went over some key guiding questions about the day. I think the main key idea to take home was what kind of physical educator will you become? I think it is an important question to ask and I never really thought about it before. The only preconception that I had for Physical Education was playing games and other sports in school so that we get some physical activity within our daily school life. However, today’s discussion led to some other thoughts about what physical education should be doing in schools.

The first day was very interesting. We mainly reflected on our experiences in Physical Education classes during our school years before post-secondary education.

I never really felt or considered that Physical Education was not really doing anything because I as a participant remember really enjoying all PE classes. However, I realized that it was because I was just naturally active person and I remembered how there were some of my classmates who just could not participate well in the activities in general. I think I remember this happened more often during high school years.

I think some of our discussion was around how we could implement better quality physical education to the public school system as a teacher. I think the main take away from our first session is the idea of providing a physical education so that the students learn to become physically literate people and promote healthy living.

Overall, it was a good introduction to the teaching of physical activities.