Day 5 was a welcome break from the established routine. We had some micro-teaching groups present their lesson plans, and I was very impressed with their work, especially a lesson on bike safety for middle-school-level students – the presenters did an excellent job of fielding questions and adapting their instruction to the class conditions. I see that as a skill which every teacher needs to cultivate – I’ve unfortunately seen many instances where this was not the case, and it’s just sad.
Then we went to a dance studio on campus and spent a long time playing with hula-hoops and jump-ropes. The chance to experiment with these implements, and work through lessons designed around them, showed me a side of instruction that I don’t often encounter, and gave me some valuable insight about how physical education can serve classroom education and vice-versa. My favorite part was when we had to come up with a jump-rope rhyme themed on a topic pulled from a hat; my group won the competition with a rhyme about a forest ecosystem which I can’t precisely remember. Something about bears and bees and flowers – we scaled it all the way from secondary consumers all the way down to natural resources.
What this did for me was show me in a concrete fashion exactly how health and fitness instruction can relate directly to more academic disciplines. That’s a bad way of characterizing it – more accurately I’d say that these activities helped me demolish the mental wall between “PE” and everything else. I’m looking forward to helping my students do something similar.
Ten Thousand Small Steps 