This week’s lesson was on Dance and also was looking at cultural relevance, performative and kinesthetic understanding.

The class was able to try a form of Greek traditional group dance during our time in the gym. I think this was a very good way to approach dancing to the students.

Many times, when I look back, dancing section of physical education was something not everyone enjoyed. However, this particular lesson had a cultural aspect as well as teamwork and a lot of movements that varied in complexity and intensity.

I think the dance lesson was really well planned out to accommodate an intensive physical activity that helped students to move while dancing and also brought in the aspect of inclusivity for all students where all students had to do the same thing to achieve certain goal, which was to make a big circle and dance in sync to the music.

I think dance lesson should be more active and also be accommodating for creativity for students to try new things and also be inclusive. Sometimes, some students do not like to dance and something simple like jumping and kicking could help them to engage in the activity without even realizing that it is a form of dance that the student is doing.

Overall, it was great to see how the dancing lesson was fun for everyone and got everyone to become engaged in the activity.

End.

Post lesson reflection:

Our team teach lesson for today was on Gymnastics. I think overall, it went very well and no one was injured or hurt during the activities that we have planned for the day.

I think what really went well for our lesson was how it was organized into different sections that worked towards different movement skills as well as using different muscles of your body.

During the lesson, I was in charge of the locomotion station where we were exploring and engaging with different ways of traveling across the mat. I was mostly demonstrating different movements that the students could use to make a sequence of movement across the mat. The instruction and demonstration had to be clear so that no one gets hurt and understand how to move in certain ways. Overall, throughout the lesson, I think my strength was being able to deliver instructions quick and clear. However, I think there could have been more keen on checking for understanding after the instructions that I have made, even though it might have been quick and clear.

One thing that I noticed in lesson planning and actually delivering the lesson was that I need to have clear instruction for myself as well so that I know what I am doing in the lesson. Of course the explanations have to be there for my lesson plans, but when planning, it also has to be very clear and organized in a way that I can clearly understand the points that I want to deliver. Once I get into too much detail, it might become redundant and also distract me from focusing on what I want to accomplish in a particular lesson.

Lastly, during the lesson, my partner and I had to scrap some of the movement that we had in the locomotion station. We figured that for some, the some of the movements were a little difficult and people were not ready to do it, so we limited the movements to more simple and appropriately challenging ones. I think overall, this did not make any difference with the lesson because when we were planning, we anticipated that some of the movements might be a little difficult, and thus was ready to make accommodations for the particular situation.

All in all, it was a successful gymnastic lesson.

End.

This weeks’ main focus was about creating inclusive learning environment and planning for physical education instructions.

One of the main question from this week that I engaged with is the question of how I could plan for a quality physical education as I prepare to become a teacher.

The one really fundamental thing that I took from this particular week is that we need to ask ourselves the question “what are the students learning?”. I think this is the most fundamental question that every teacher should ask when they are planning for a lesson, whether it is a physical education lesson or any lesson in general.

The general outcomes of physical activity is more important than activities like doing specific sport, skills or dance. This does not mean that I cannot do specific sports but I want to make sure I plan my lesson and instructions clear so that students can follow these guidelines to gain more physical literacy and become more confident in moving their bodies. Specific sports could come after, but it is important for us as teachers to make sure that they are having fun but also from these activities, they gain important but basic physical literacies.

However, I think there are still many issues to be covered and there are more learnings to be done.

End.

Today’s topic was about Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) and Game Sense Moving for social awareness. Our in-class activity was based on inventing games.

The inventing game activity was composed of two main activities. One was actually inventing the game from scratch, and the other was teaching the game to the others in the class. At first, I did not really know what inventing games might look like because I never tried it when I was going through public school years. However, I thought that the activity might fit better at the end of the school year or the semester.

The reason for this is because I think it might be a good tool for assessing the knowledge and understanding of the core physical movements and other skills that they have learned throughout the semester. This activity really forces the students to be creative and makes them to think back at the semester for their own reference to invent a game or an activity. The inventing aspect also allows the room for the students to have fun while they are making their own activity and teaching their peers also solidify their understanding of the subject they have learned.

Overall, I think the whole day really captured the TGfU model in terms of starting off with a invented game and from that understanding, we were able to build our own invented games. Thus, it was interesting to see how it worked in an actual class setting.