Monthly Archives: March 2016

Practicum week 6 thoughts

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This last week went by very quickly, there was a lot of excitement happening at the school with spirit week, Senior boys provincial basketball game, and the anticipation of the arrival of spring break.  I felt like all of my classes were performing exceptionally well as a whole.  The only problem I had was with my senior PE class, this is the class that I just picked up and have the least exposure to so far.  The first week that I had them went smoothly, because it was well organized and combined with the other three PE classes in that block.  This week was a bit of a roller coaster ride with the senior PE class.  The week started out well with our dance performances with guest appearances by two other teachers/teacher candidates.  The students were well behaved, very supportive of each other, and engaged in what was happening.  The next day I introduced the inventing games unit, and for the rest of the week we invented games from the “target games” from the TGFU model (Click here for my criteria that I used for inventing games).  I started the unit by teaching them my invented game called “disc bocce” (Click here for lesson plan on disc bocce).  Surprisingly, the students were really into the game and were having more fun than I expected.  The actual inventing games aspect took a little while for all the groups the get settled down and get working, but for the most part, they were all engaged in inventing their games.  On the final day before spring break, I had them teach each other their invented games and they were rowdier than usual.  I’m not sure if it was because it was the day before spring break, or the fact that target games are less active by nature and they wanted to move, or I just have not 100% earned their respect as their teacher just yet, or a combination of all of the above.  It just disheartened me a little bit because I thought senior PE was going to be easy to control because they are older and should be more “mature”.

It was definitely interesting trying out the inventing games model.  This was a model taught to my PE cohort by the actual inventor of this teaching model (Dr. Joy Butler from UBC).  She strongly believes that this is the way to go in order to motivate students to play and have fun while learning at the same time.  It was funny the students reactions when they found out that they were the one’s having to invent the games and not that I invent a bunch of games for them to play.  For the most part I think Dr. Butler is actually onto something by creating this teaching model.  I was very pleased at how all the groups of students came up with games completely unique from each other.  One group even took away the sedentary nature of conventional target games and added a role that required a lot of moving around and tossing game objects.

Practicum week 5 thoughts

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Last week was generally a very good week.  There was only one lesson that I thought could have worked differently if I had organized it differently.  I got my Socials 9 class to do a carousel activity where at each station groups would read a section in the textbook then write down a question for the next group to answer.  The all the following groups would then read the section, answer the question, and write a new question for the next group.  In theory, this would have been a great learning activity.  However, what started happening was that students started wandering and certain individuals started doing all the work for their groups.  Thinking back, some things that I may decide to do to combat these issues are:

  1. Get students seated and enforce that they be seated when doing the group work
  2. Have a different student do the reading and writing at each table so that more people are involved and on task
  3. Have a brain break half way through the activity so that students aren’t always focused on the content at hand

When I was taught this activity at UBC, I thought it was a great activity because it got students moving and thinking at the same time.  Potentially students would have less inactivity because they are moving to the next station (physical activity) and then reading and writing at the stations (mental activity).  The problem with how it was taught to me was that it was very generally taught, instructors did not go into detail on different ways to keep students on task, or how to actually organize it.  All of my suggested changes to the activity came from my own reflection and discussion with my Socials SA.