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