Celebrating Success

Empowerment and Action Through Physical Activity

Our 'Connections to Community' unit in grade 5 physical education has been rooted in the big idea of inspiring and empowering young people to be physically active through meaningful and relevant activities  that are possible for students to follow up on in our community after school and on weekends. 

We have designed this unit in a way that  focuses on the concepts of 'taking action' and 'social connection'.  In my last  blog post,  I shared the assessment booklets created for the students to record their learning over the last few classes of this unit and to do final reflections.   As you can see in the photo below (which is from their assessment booklet), the specific things that they are encouraged to work on developing are outcomes directly stated in our physical education and health scope and sequence.

As we are in the final stretch of this unit, the students have  focused on one physical activity that they would like to devote themselves to  the rest of the unit and work with their peer group to create different types of games/activities  that help them to develop their skills in this particular  area.  In the last few classes, my goal is to interview each student in order to give them an opportunity to discuss their learning and what they are most proud of. 

I'd like to share one student's video below. She has worked really hard in this unit to develop her skills in both basketball and in bicycling. She has focused on better developing her bicycling skills for the  remainder of the unit and has been super engaged in helping her peer group to design  challenging bike courses and different types of  activities during PE time to   help develop their specific skills related to cycling. 

As a physical educator, nothing is more satisfying than a young person finding true value   and meaning through physical activity that can result in a more enriched life experience.  ​The amazing thing about the girl in the video is that she just learned to ride a bike for the first time at the beginning of this school year. The first unit of the year was individual pursuits and  bicycling was one of the  important areas focused on. She's only been riding a bike for the past several months but has really embraced   this form of physical activity and has found a lot of joy in it.   It's been amazing to see her progress.  

She is planning to team up with the other 3 students who have also  focused on bicycling in our 'Connections to Community' unit in PE  and  go out into the community on the weekends to  create a challenging cycling course  that they can share with other students wanting  to tackle a new challenge by bike.  They have already spoken about using google maps to  and other tech to help map out their course.   

Hope you enjoy the video below.   Thanks for reading.