As a Physical Educator I have the wondrous opportunity to not only work with one class a day, but multiple. I get to work with every student in the school and learn everyone’s faces. This presents a marvelous opportunity for me as an educator to address certain changes with lesson plans because I see so many classes throughout the week. While I was out at Mountain View Elementary School I had the privilege of working with four or five classes a day. Often when teaching elementary school children, you cover many foundational movements such as throwing and catching, and then work off of that desired skill. Many different grades cover the same course content because some children need to practice a skill more, some need a review, etc. While working with my classes we covered Throwing and Catching with two different classes. This was a great chance to analyze and evaluate the work I put into my lesson plans because between classes I can assess what worked and what didn’t. I can make changes accordingly that result in improvements.
In my experience in teaching the first and second grade students how to throw and catch, I changed a variety of things. Based on the children’s’ performance I changed what kind of ball they were using, what the task was, how challenging the task was, and even how long they covered one task. I was able to change this based on the performance of how the students were doing. If I had a few students that were really excelling I gave them individually more challenging activities, but the rest needed time to work and focus on the task at hand. This was a way that I was able to meet my students’ learning needs. Even just based on a class to class revision of my lesson plan.
With that prior experience I can now go back and revise my lesson plan even further for the next time I cover Throwing and Catching. This will allow me to perfect the mistakes I have made, examine instructions for a task, and alter activities in order to help students succeed, and have them be more actively engaged and get more out of the lesson.