October 30, 2015
Guiding questions:
* What is physical literacy?
This was our day to team teach and my contribution to the group was to read the chapters and do a summary of the above. This is my summary of physical literacy Chapter 13 Teaching Physical Education Today Canadian Perspectives, Daniel B. Robinson & Lynn Randall
Dawn Wilson – September 24, 2015
CHAPTER SUMMARY
Physical literacy is no mind-from-body separation and consider the holistic physical, mental and emotional development of the physically active child.
Shift the subject of PE from a prescribed activity-centered performance model to a person-centered participation model.
Physical literacy stems from three dimensions: Cognitive, Motor (movement) & Affect (social, emotional, spiritual)
Four key indicators of physical literacy: Functional capacities (function), Contextualized capabilities (form), Expressive possibilities (feeling), Flow consciousness (flow)
Expanding PE to include alternative activities such as hiking, climbing or even hula-hooping. Get students to try new things and expose those who may be less athletic a chance to succeed. PE was more focused in teaching athletic sports we have now moved to “physical literacy as the characteristic of a physically literate individual that moves with poise, economy and confidence in a wide variety of physically challenging situations.
I quite enjoyed learning more about this and realizing that PE has REALLY changed! The various activities that we can include and there are many different activities we can use. My initial thought was the way we could include some of traditional practices into PE. Imagine that our ancestors paddled every where! So many outdoor activities that we could have included. In terms of our lesson delivery, a few things I could have personally improve on: directions delivery, time of activities, set up outside, use of whistle. Overall I found the lesson prep and delivery quite enjoyable.
Group A Week #7 Post 4
October 30, 2015
Guiding questions: * What ideas are used to create a safer, inclusive and respectful environment?
Interesting that I am writing this post tonight. My first full day of practicum in the classroom and observing the entire day of activities. (The other three days were on field trips). The teacher is responsible for teaching PE, as the PE teacher of 20+ years retired and now the PE classes are the responsibility of the teacher. They were wrapping up their unit on soccer and today was final evaluation day to see what skills the students have mastered and continue to use. The class started with a “talk” about safety, followed by warm-up and alternating games of soccer with 4 team. Two teams played against each other for three minute intervals. During the course of the class, one student got hit in the face with the soccer ball, two students slipped, another took a blow to her stomach area. As discussed in our class, it is so important to go over safety with students and especially in a place like Mount Pleasant where the gym is very small and your only option is to sit on benches on the side lines. I almost got hit at one point. My point is, it is a great responsibility to take on with students and to teach them the importance of technique, i.e. in terms of soccer to stop the ball before kicking, not bunching up, passing, team work, etc. In our small groups I asked about earth quake this has crossed my mind as well! I am a guest at this school and I do not know the safety procedures should this happen. Safety has been on mind every since and the importance of monitoring and doing our part as the teacher to ensure students are safe. I am also thinking about my long practicum in January and the possible lesson plans that I will need to develop carry out.
Gymnastics was so fun! I have never been able to do a cartwheel and I actually get really dizzy doing rolls and spins, but I still had such a blast. The Disney music, this amazing cohort and excellent instruction from Stephen were probably all huge factors. Anyway, after reading the chapters this week I was feeling very daunted by the legalities that teachers face, and especially P.E. teachers. There are so many risks to consider while teaching physical activity and gymnastics seems to be one of the most accident-prone of all. I think the obvious ways to avoid risk are being really vigilant about teaching safety before each class, getting consistent routines in place around the way the kids behave on and around the equipment, ensuring you are able to see the entire space as much as possible and creating a stop signal that allows the students to finish what they’re doing before stopping.
Something that I took away from this class was the range of activities and movements you could teach your students with little to no equipment. For the younger grades, especially, you could teach all those travelling movements (skipping, hopping, leaping, side-stepping), the spinning movements and balancing movements without anything other than mats. I liked the idea of creating our own tableau after we learned the movements or creating our own routine. I would be excited to try something like this with students during Practicum. I really appreciated this lesson, as many schools do not have access to all the equipment we saw in the gymnastics space on Tuesday.
I always loved gymnastics as a kid and would do cartwheels around the field for hours, more often than not I would be doing cartwheels or handstands all day long!
I didn’t know how to approach this as a subject in PE and don’t think I ever did it in my own PE classes but this was a great way to teach gymnastics safely and effectively. I liked the progression activity where we practiced different ways of moving through space (walking, rolling and spinning). This is an accessible definition of gymnastics and one that does not involve twisted ankles and sports injuries. Gymnasts are often seen as very small, elite athletes and it was a lot of fun to play around with gymnastics without the pressure of being an elite athlete. I will definitely try out these lessons in my classes.
The balance activities with partners and in groups was also very effective. Line Tag with bean bag balancing was another great version of tag. Students were engaged just by trying to balance the bean bag and stay on the lines.
The parachute was also a lot fun – can’t wait to do this in practicum!
It was also great to see everyone so happy in this class. There was a lot of cheering and risk taking going on when we all did our own versions of cartwheels, shoulder rolls and log rolls. Great job class!
(Everything I have to say this week is positive!)
In today’s P.E. class, we discussed about safety and risk management in teaching. This got me thinking about how I conducted safety measures and solved for risky situation while I was working at daycamps. I will admit that I am probably one of the more explorative type of leader who allow students more options for activities. I think I was able to do this because I made my boundaries and expectations clear to the campers. Another huge reason that allowed me to take bigger risk was the trust that reciprocated between the campers and me. Like we have been discussing all along in our P.E. class, keep assessing your students to know where they are. The interesting thing I discovered was that as time went by, I began performing assessments without even thinking about how I was going to do them. They became second nature to me. However, we must always reflect on our assessments to prevent bias and the possibility of labeling students. On a side note, gym class was an absolute blast. I think the most important lesson we learned today is that no one is too old for Disney music.
Today we learned about educational gymnastics. I had a great time moving around and exploring the space, and especially enjoyed playing with the parachute and planning our group dance. One of the guiding questions this week is: What are the legal responsibilities of educators in a range of movement contexts? We discussed in my group that as educators, we are responsible to find out and acknowledge any challenges our student may be facing in regards to carrying out certain movements in PE. We are responsible for catering to the various levels of movement that our students may have, by providing a range of movements– from low to high challenge. Encouraging students to push themselves is important, but allowing them to engage in challenge by choice is even more important. The answers to this guiding question go hand in hand with the following guiding question: What ideas are used to create a safer, inclusive and respectful environment? Challenge by choice is another major point under this question, as is respecting that students possess many different levels of ability when it comes to movement. To create a safer and inclusive environment, providing various levels to a lesson should be implemented, as well as giving oral and visual demonstrations of how movements should be conducted.
First and foremost I’d like to say that Cristina, Lisa, Christine and Audrey did a fantastic job on their lesson. I loved how we were put into clans and was then used as a way to keep us organized for the rest of the lesson. I also really appreciated the prey-predator game they chose and immediately I could see how it could be applied to a science lesson- I will most likely be using it!
Another big thing I took away was the realization that we really don’t have to go far when taking our students outside. We are so lucky to live in a city that is surrounded by beautiful green spaces and parks and you don’t need to always plan an extravagant field trip to Stanley park, deep cove or cypress to reap the benefits of an outdoor lesson. Those outings may not always be possible so in the mean time- JUST GET OUTSIDE! It seems kids are spending less time outdoors and I find this really unsettling. I spoke to my sponsor teacher about this and he told me that many of his students have never been to the beach before. They’ve never experienced the smell of fresh salt air, the sensation of wet sand between their toes, the excitement of gazing in a tide pool and finding tiny little creatures and I wonder, if they’ve never experienced these things, why would they care to learn about it? Why would they care if it were no longer there? How could they understand the importance of reducing our carbon footprint? How would they ever learn to respect and care for the natural world? And what would all of that mean for the future of our world?
I really enjoyed this week’s lesson on outdoor education. I’ll admit that I came into this class at the beginning of the term quite apprehensive about the prospect of teaching PE, let alone teaching it outside with all the extra layers of considerations and complications! However, I thought the group did a great job with their lesson, helping us all understand more about alternative environment and outdoor education and how it doesn’t have to be such a scary thing. I love how Audrey’s knowledge of Gitxsan dance was incorporated into the transition to bring us outside for the lesson. I also appreciated the review of safety protocols and ensuring that we have plans in place for situations that could arise from being in open, public spaces (e.g. if a child gets lost, injured, etc.). The team did their due diligence by scouting out the location for potential risks and safety issues the day before teaching. In practice, we should also gather support from parents, volunteers, and other teachers, as well when organizing outdoor activities. There is so much we can learn from different environments, and we should provide opportunities for our students to experience this.
In our small group review of the readings, we discussed the components to planning a lesson. Christina pointed out the importance of organization and having a “Plan B”, especially when it comes to outdoor education where conditions can be unpredictable or uncontrollable (e.g. weather). We also talked about how outdoor education is not limited to physical education. There are many cross-curricular connections that can be made – to art, to science, to math, to social studies – the possibilities are endless.
First off, thank you to the group who organized the group teach this week. If we had gotten Gymnastics I would have felt extremely daunted by the task. Which is funny considering I loved Gymnastics in PE growing up and was always unbelievably excited when we came into the gym and saw the full apparatus pulled out from the wall. I guess I just couldn’t wrap my head around coming up with inclusive activities for something I have always thought to be quite independent. I think the group who taught did an excellent job not only of coming up with exercises that were great for large groups of students, and of explaining things slowly, carefully, and authentically as if we were actually young children.
I also thought it was great that the teachers were flexible with us coming up with new games or versions of how to do things at each station. We’ve learned time and time again how important flexibility is to being a good teacher, so them being okay with letting us tweak games as we got better at the fundamental movement skills was awesome.
I also liked that their games involved a lot of teamwork and positive reinforcement, and will most definitely be activities I use in my classroom with my students one day. Great job Sienna, Sydney, and Maria. Loved your teach!
