I did a bit of research on the internet to figure out where the idea of banning tag in schools came from. It seems as if it originate in the state of Washington from the Mercer County School District who wanted to implement a hands off during recess. Their intention is to ensure physical and emotional safety for all the students, and they feel that in order to do that students should not touch each other. The school board believes that students will not be able to work properly in the class room if they do not feel safe. Some other reasons for the banning of almost everyone’s childhood game, is that certain students may always be the one who is ‘it’ and if they cannot tag someone else, then they could begin to develop a complex. Or if certain students are always the one who is ‘out’ all the time, by sitting on the side lines that could be hurtful on their self-esteem. In instances, I remember a few students ‘tagging’ or hitting pretty hard when they wanted to get someone out. I believe the way the last group restructured the game of tag last Tuesday was a great idea. Everyone was pair up and the person who was ‘it’ was switched constantly.  It established an inclusive environment for the game. Here is the link I found for the article.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/world/tag-youre-it

Honestly, I didn’t understand exactly recall what P.E Literacy meant at first, forgetting about the definition of ‘literacy’. In re-learning from Steve and classmates through discussion what it means. I knew it was understanding physical educational language, in the beginning of the discussion, I was thinking that I wasn’t a PE literate person. My perception was the old school ways of PE.  In reflection of the readings it highlighted how important it is to create a safe learning environment for all students. Whitehead stated the importance of teaching the movements to promote healthy living versus run, jump, and be competitive because that could come later. In discussion of what teachers can do is help motivate by teaching about healthy living is a ‘building block’ (Steve words) to give tools of confidence to students. They will be competent and therefore will have a better understanding and have the knowledge to make healthy choices for oneself. “Teachers provide the experience of P.E. literacy” (Whitehead, 2014). Also, another interesting part of this article is that I was able to better understand about the art of flow, as in Case #1, “Timid Timmy”, how PE had a negative impact on him as he didn’t have a desire to run however he was interactive with people online from all over the world who had the same interests as he did for the art of flow, juggling. Physical literacy is life long learning, I am happy to learn more about it.

Physical literacy is an important concept to grasp as an educator – for me, it’s so easy to get caught up facilitating a game or watching to make sure everyone’s following the rules that I can lose track of what the kids are supposed to be learning!  I think the focus in this class on keeping things simple is helping with this concept for me.  PE isn’t about kids mastering the rules and skills for sports.  That can be involved, but what’s most important is giving kids opportunities to move and explore different ways of being healthy for life.  I think that both of the groups that have done their team teach so far have done an excellent job on teaching lessons that are a good balance of simple and engaging, and they’ve been really accessible for multiple ability levels.

The readings for this week addressed multiliteracies, a concept that has been popping up in multiple courses (I’m starting to see a pattern…)  I feel very encouraged by the fact that this is such a focus in PE.  I find it very helpful to structure my thinking on making PE accessible by thinking about the different literacies involved in creating a PE lesson – does it teach movement skills, teamwork, healthy lifestyles, including others?  These are important skills that help kids learn to be healthy and active, but also support learning in other curricular environments.

Initially i found the concept of physical literacy a tad bit confusing, because i didn’t read into it very much. However as the readings progressed I soon realized the entirety of how beautiful this theory or concept really is, very much like reading, physicality doesn’t have to be relegated to just sports, PE, getting into shape or pre-wedding traditions. Physical literacy looks at the entire life of the human whether they are inclined towards having phenomenal physical attributes or just someone who enjoys to walk and dance. The main point is that they get up and move, the texts and readings use key words and phrases such as, respectful, life long, holistic, adventurous, appropriate, trust, empathy, encouraging, and and many more.

The main point is that as educators there is a need to enable and encourage our students to keep on moving for the rest of their life. Thus we need to be mindful that we are creating an environment that will foster literate physical movers for life and that we need to focus both on the literacy part and the educational component of teaching rather than just using sports or their own innate motivations to attain this level of literacy.

I think the most important element of physical literacy is that being physically literate means you can participate in, and hopefully enjoy, a wide range of physical activities. Although there are definitely specific literacies for different sports and activities, having a set of basic skills is the first step. I think our focus with PE in schools should be preparing students for a life of physical activity. For this reason it is so important that students get to gain skills in a wide variety of relevant activities. I know, as far as my PE education is concerned, that nothing in class prepared me for the physical activities I now enjoy. For my daughter I hope that her PE classes are much more relevant to her life. Currently she’s doing gymnastics in her kindergarden PE class, and while she loves it, I don’t really understand the sacred position gymnastics holds in the PE curriculum. As far as I know, very, very few people go on to enjoy gymnastics as their sport of choice after leaving school. I recognize that there are many transferable skills in gymnastics but why not learn the same skills with dance or yoga, which are much more popular with adults?

In planning and teaching our lesson, I felt very restricted given our time allowance. There was so much we wanted to include in our lesson- acknowledging the territory, the importance of positive self talk, modeling proper technique, giving adequate feedback along the way and of course, plenty of time to play! However, it was a strong reminder of the importance of having everything prepped, organized and ready to go in order to make the most of a lesson, whether it be 30 minutes long or 60. With that in mind and considering everything we know of the importance of physical activity for mental, physical and emotional well being, I’m surprised and disappointed with the fact that elementary P.E classes are only 30 minutes long. I don’t think this is enough time not only for a teacher to try to incorporate so many necessary and enriching elements into their lesson plans, but also it doesn’t give students enough time to play either. I noticed how engaged everyone was during the timed and competitive portion of 21 and I think my biggest challenge throughout the whole process was having to tell the class that the time was up! However, I believe this points to the need to place more emphasis on physical education and to incorporate physical activity across the curriculum.

I found a lot of the ideas in this week’s readings to be very relatable to me. Although I do enjoy engaging in sporting activities, I have always felt that PE classes (at least in my experiences) tend to favor specific groups of students while alienating others. My personal experiences in PE classes placed great importance on fundamental skills and sport literacy, but ignored the mental and emotional elements of physical literacy. Developing an understanding of the fundamental movement skills is a necessary building block for further exploration of function, form, feelings, and flow. However, it seems that too often teachers get caught up in the fundamentals without acknowledging the large variety of ways in which these skills can be applied to everyday life (not just on the sports field). The textbook offered many interesting alternative ideas for PE activities that I have not been lucky enough to participate in, but believe would be most excellent to incorporate into the curriculum. Some of these ideas include circus and flow arts, yoga, climbing, juggling, hooping, martial arts, and horse riding (pg.234). I believe that the more variety a teacher incorporates into their lessons, the more likely they will be able to appeal to a larger audience. Physical and Health Education is not just for athletic students and we need to develop teaching approaches that reflects this.

What is my vision of teaching? Physical education while I was growing up was an experience that wasn’t always fun as it led to shaming and the varsity kids always leading the pack. it wasn’t until I started to become athletic and my propioception increased that I was able to start having fun and being included. However I look back and I wonder if all the other kids that didn’t  find a way to fit in to the make it or break it style of teaching, what was their experience like.

Thus it leads me back to my original question of what is my vision? Well I hope that it will be fun and inclusive which would get away from the hall of shame style teaching and towards physical literacy. This hopefully would be a class where the kids learn to move at their own pace getting away from the competition and towards movement for the sake of moving towards a healthier lifestyle. A lifestyle that would incorporate a holistic meaning into their life where not only would the mental, spiritual and emotional be taken care of but the physical as well. Because the entirety of the circle or the holistic vision is reliant on all four components working together to form a fuller healthier human.

A few things. I’m finding first of all, constantly, cross curricular findings in our classes. Just as we recently read for Prof. Roman’s class, the history of the inclusion/exclusion of various groups of students in Ontario, we again touched on this here in chapter 8. As well, as we discussed, in both Prof. Kendrick’s and Prof. Early’s class, language learning transcends curriculums and is relevant in all subjects, we are discussing how outdoor ed. and PE may also be present across the curriculum. This can also allow to support the understanding that Aboriginal education is not an isolated subject in itself, but should be infused into all areas of education. In practice, as educators, across the board, lesson planning is just as important in PE as in all other subjects. Students’ progress, as well as lessons, need to be measured and assessed in order to be meaningful and purposeful. The assessment tasks should be multiple and varied, in order to allow all students to display what each of them has uniquely learned. We need to become physically educated and physically literate as educators, so that we may physical educate. Again as seen in the readings for our other courses, Ontario seems to be a leader of sorts in the directions education seems to be heading. In the same ways that outdoor education and physical education need to be included along a multitude of curriculums, we need to include what we learn in this way, throughout life long learning and practice. And just as in everything we do in practice, we do not utilize our abilities in confined themed moments. In every endeavour we are using a variety of skill sets and knowledge bases. Just as here I am, happily deploying and practicing writing for PE.