Great work to Sonya, Emily, and Pamela on their group teach! They did a good job considering the cognitive and psychomotor levels of their grade two students and how to best design a lesson for this age group. They considered how well grade twos would be able to follow instructions, run around with spatial awareness, and their ability to throw and catch.
I appreciated assessing the baseball activity. Looking at how well an activity incorporates participation, challenge, positive social behaviors, flow, safety and learning, are all important factors that I need to consider when creating my own lessons. As well, I need to keep in mind the objective of each lesson and criterion-reference what I am teaching to assess how well the students’ are learning in relation to what I want them to learn.
Some assessment and evaluation strategies that I prefer are exit slips, learning logs, and observation. I like the idea of reflectively assessing improvement instead of skill level as not everyone is athletic. I understand that in older grades there might be some sort of fitness testing that monitors effort/improvement, but I prefer the idea of active participation over grading. I also never liked written tests for P.E., and I feel that for the most part, P.E. should not have tests that involve pen and paper as all the other subjects already do.
Well put Jackie! The attention to both the psychomotor and cognitive skills was right on the money! I agree that they really had the age group in mind when planning their lesson and it worked on more skills than I originally thought! The assessment of your lesson is vital to planning the lesson in order to really get an idea about how the plan will work out. I hated written tests in PE as well and I agree with you that there are other ways to assess and evaluate the students learning rather than written tests. Finally, the assessment also contributed to understanding everything about the lesson and provides places to change different aspects of the lesson.