How do we foster meaningful experiences in physical education?
As teachers, as we plan our units, are we thinking of what is relevant for students? Or shall we call them experiences instead of units? What will bring them joy? What will help them develop interpersonal skills? Perhaps improve their motor competence? Is fun a critical element to fostering meaningful experiences?
After a few years of online school and disrupted learning due to the coronavirus infection, we are back face to face and minimizing restrictions. This has had a significant impact on our teaching and learning.
This year I’m also teaching grade five learners again, and our second transdisciplinary unit was “How We Express Ourselves” a rhythmic gymnastics experience in our PE lessons. We were able to plan for intentional and continuous learning exploring the commonalities and different points of view from the classroom teachers, the arts, and physical education.
This year we wanted to use the meaningful PE approach in this experience and we added the creativity feature as we thought it could be relevant to the students learning and understanding of the unit.
So we started the unit by asking the students “How this experience can be meaningful to me?”
And documented it using a large piece of paper for each feature of the meaningful PE approach
This whole activity didn’t take more than 15 minutes
During the first week, we had a number of activities for students to learn, practice and develop basic gymnastics skills such as rols, balances, jumps and leaps.
The week after we starting introducing different rhythmic gymnastics apparatus, ball, hoop and ribbon.
Students explored different ways to move the different apparatus, as well as to combine them with different gymnastics’ skills.
We had QR codes with expert videos for them to learn more about it, and teachers were facilitators of learning.
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