Grade 1: Front-Loading Assessment in Health Related Exercise Unit

Recording data is a very important maths skill with young students. PE presents an amazing array of opportunities for kids to record data in a number of different ways. In the past, I have given students assessment sheets to help them record their progress with particular skills related to the PE unit that they were engaged in. But, what I found was that some students struggled with trying to organize their thoughts and data on paper. Classroom teachers can spot these issues in an instance when they are tuned into their students, but as single subject specialists, we see our kids once, maybe twice a week AND we often have loads of kids to teach. Presently, I am teaching about 280 students in our PYP program. 


What I am doing more of this year is front-loading assessment a week in advance of when the kids will actually do the assessment on their own. It has worked wonders with getting them tuned into what needs to be done. After I model how it should be done, the following lesson I individually give them their own formative assessment sheets to record data on.  What I have found is that after modeling, a week in advance what needs to be done, the students are much more able to handle the task. Often times, I give the completed record sheets to the students' classroom teachers to use in maths class for graphing, creating tables, or general problem solving which helps support their maths needs. 


In the photo example given above, the students were engaged in 4 different fitness related tasks. I had set up stations in which they would have to rotate through and record, upon completion of each station, how well they did. The 4 stations were skipping, hopping over cones, running laps of the gym, and playing catch. The 'Playing Catch' station was needed to give them a break from the other stations which were very high intensity. 


Please see video below of the kids in action. Front-loading assessment ahead of time, works great. Try it out. Good classroom teachers do it all of the time. If we can do it in PE, music, and other single subjects, it lends itself to success

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