Moving into week 4 of my practicum I set myself with two goals: really inviting those less confident students to engage in the classroom, and giving students choice over the main activity of an entire class.

For PE, I asked my students if they wanted to do one last day for a  doubles Badminton tournament, or if they would like to move on to their dance unit. Every single student raised their hand in favor for the badminton tournament. SUCCESS!

The tournament started with an student lead Invented Warm-up, setting a high level of engagement, and followed with students choosing their own partners for the tournament. Students were responsible for writing down their Win or Loss on the score-board and finding a new team to play after every game. This class required very little teacher management and was 99% student centered. This is how a class should be! Students in control of their learning; engaged and socially interacting with each-other.

For Spanish class, I started a new unit on Commands. The first class was very teacher centered, more than I would have liked, however, this first class set the students up for success for the rest of the week. I introduced the rules of how to create commands so that for the following lessons students would be able to conjugate any regular verbs. The second and third lesson of the week had the students starting the class off with an interactive activity where students had to say “Pasa!” (pass), “No pases!”(do not pass) or “Cruza!”(cross) in order to pass two dodge-balls around the room and get their classmates out. Once their classmate was”out”, the class commanded their peer to do something by using a Spanish command. ie, Baila!(dance), Canta!(sing). Some less outgoing students were not participating to the same extent as the more outgoing students, however, the more outgoing students got really into the activity, setting a high, positive energy in the class which was contagious to the other less confident students who eventually started to engage a little more, at one point some of them couldn’t help but laugh and smile!

Going into Week 5, I will be giving my PE students almost full choice over their dance classes. This will be very interesting to observe. My Spanish class will start creating their own skits based on their own realities, as well as creating their own scavenger hunt, choosing the directions and actions that their peers will have to do.