After reviewing my blog posts for HOPE journal, I think I have some idea of which direction I want to take this with the new perspective about physical education.

First of all, I think I have gained an important perspective and attitude towards physical education throughout this particular course. I have never envisioned physical activity to be this in depth and broad as a curriculum and an education. I think what I really want to focus is the idea of how it feels to be healthy. I want to really push through to connecting the things that I have learned in this class to really focusing on helping students to feel healthy and that it feels good to be healthy.

I think I definitely found some of my strength in my role as a physical health educator. I found that I have good projection of my voice and is able to make instructions very simple. However, simple instruction will not have any impact when there is no purpose behind it. This is something that really struck me during my time in this course. I know how to be simple and be a good presence in the gym as an instructor, but I think I really lacked in the purpose in terms of thinking that physical education was just doing different games and activities that the students could enjoy.

This led me to think about the what I am learning in the IB cohort as well. It is hard to miss the emphasis on the purpose of learning. Every lesson should have a purpose because knowledge can be gained by searching for them on the internet. Why do we participate in certain physical activity? Why do we engage in certain topics? Because we want the students to feel the importance of these big ideas. The importance of physical activity and being healthy cannot be taught unless the students experience them for themselves. Studying different subjects comes from similar perspective. The importance of learning cannot be taught unless students feel that there is a need and that there is a interesting thing about it and we can explore more into it.

I think this leads to the idea of what makes a good physical health educator? I think as I have felt throughout the course, a good physical health educator is a person who can guide students to become engaged in activities that they might have never approached if they were to do it by themselves. Physical health literacy can only be achieved once the students start moving around. However, they have to be purposeful and meaningful, even though the students might not know it at the time. The importance is how I can get the students to be more engaged with all different activities that can promote healthy living.

If a person is physically or healthy literate, the person knows why health is really important in our lives. Moreover, they are people who can discern whether they are making healthy choices and are being physically active and choose to be more active than their current self if the discernment does not see a great support of good examples of physical activities.

Health and physical activity can become an issue where the world is becoming more comfortable, fast and in some ways, more lazy than the previous generation. I think this mindfulness really helps us to understand what is really important, not just in physical activities but in all other courses as well.

Thus ends my Hope Journal entries, and I really enjoyed my time being in this class which helped me a lot in gaining new perspective about this area.

End.

This session was on individual physical activity, and the lesson was particularly focused on Yoga.

This was very relaxing and interesting lesson out of all the lessons we have done.

One comment that caught my attention in this particular lesson was about the religious background in Yoga. Although it is a individual physical activity, one of the lesson providers briefly raised a comment that some have found practicing Yoga to be somewhat religious in terms of things like meditation and being able to feel one’s mind and soul and other things that could trigger a sentiment of religious practice.

This really made me to think about some of the things that might arise from parents and families from various backgrounds. This does not have to do with Yoga, but sometimes, there might be students who are uncomfortable in certain situations where they might not feel like participating in certain activities because they are mindful of their own culture. Or maybe not the students but the parents might feel a little unsure about the things that students might be doing in physical education.

I think it goes back to the question of what are we trying to teach? Whether it is Yoga or other physical activity is, our purpose should be promoting physical activity and healthy life style. To achieve that goal, we can take variety of ways and methods that could fully help students to develop various different knowledge about their body and health.

I think if this message is clear to the students and to the families and parents, it might become easier to communicate with people from different backgrounds.

Overall, it was an interesting lesson.

End.

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.

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.