Last Tuesday’s Group Teach team introduced striking and batting games to the class. It was awesome to see how everyone’s energy spiked with the conga line and the warm up activity. Although I was a little wary due to my limited dance abilities, I could see how positive this could be for an elementary class where kids could dance around and be silly and goofy without being judged. I also appreciated how we were able to practice the basic movements of batting and pitching before moving on to the main activity.
I like what Steve says about how we are all on our own physical literacy journey. We learn at our own pace and we improve at our own pace, and that is what we have to keep in mind for our students as well. This is what makes the idea of assessment so tricky. Thinking back to my high school days, I remember assessment only ever being summative and never formative. I was never given feedback to improve my learning or to identify my strengths, weaknesses, and areas of improvement. I only remember doing beep tests and push up tests at the end of the term to determine my grade, but throughout the term we never had activities directed at working on those movements. Looking back on it now, I can understand how both forms of assessment are useful. Students should be able to receive constructive feedback on their performance so they can improve upon it before being subjected to a summative assessment.
I agree that dancing makes me nervous and so when this was our warm up activity I was skeptical that I would be able to move around enough to actually get any kind of a warm up! I always look for Agnes in the crowd so we can not dance together, but today she was on the opposite side! I needed a new strategy.
Dancing in the middle of the pack was only turning into slight swaying and some enthusiastic arm waving – great for my shoudlers, but that’s about it – then I saw Christine jumping around in the back of the group with soo much space around her – this is what I needed. No music and just funny actions. I was very happy to pirouette and leap around with Christine, not worrying about the music or the beat or looking cool. 🙂 I let the actual dancers up front do that – their enthusiasm was awesome and was getting the group into the dance – even me!
Agnes, I suggest jumping around in the back row next we have to do a group dance activity – this is the third time this year and we are only 6 weeks into school! There will be more dancing.
I also love conga lines. I generally like dancing in lines. I wish I was in the Jane Austen days so this was the only kind of dancing I had to do. None of this getting low and shaking.