Guest PYP PE Teacher Contribution!! (Thanks Andy Dutton)

I just returned from Hanoi, Vietnam having had the chance to work with the elementary PE team from United Nations International School helping to define what good assessment should look and feel like in PYP PE. UNIS should be proud of its elementary PE team as they are a very passionate and switched on group of educators (Cam Mchale, Dave Cuming, and Andy Dutton). 

We collaborated and worked together on improving the process of creating pre-assessment, formative, and summative assessment tools and tasks to be used in the units that they will teach their students as the 2012-2013 school year progresses. 

Andy Dutton shared with me an excellent assessment task that he created for his kindergarten students in today’s Athletics lesson. I feel that the assessment task is very strong as it included excellent maths links, was varied, and used images to help the kindergarten students make connections to their learning experience in Athletics. 

A bit about Andy:
Andy Dutton is new to the Elementary PE team this year. Before coming to Hanoi he has worked in Australia, England, Saudi Arabia and Japan. Andy loves spending time with his family and being active.

The students had to complete 3 different tasks in this lesson; running around a 40m track, jumping and throwing. As a means of introducing the concept of both time and length measurement from Maths, Andy had the students pair up, one student being peer observer and the other student actually doing the event. 

As a way to have the students measure time, Andy had the peer observer count bananas as their partner ran around the track. So, partner A would count 1 banana, 2 banana, 3 banana and so on until their partner completed the 40m loop. They told the runner (their partner) how many bananas it took and then the runner circled the number of bananas it took them to run their loop on the assessment sheet. The same process was followed for jumping and throwing. However, the measurement of length for jumping was to pace off the number of steps they jumped and record this by circling the appropriate number of feet on the assessment sheet. For the throwing part of the assessment they threw the ball then counted off how many body lengths it was from the point they released it to where it landed. This was then recorded on their sheets as well. 

Andy had them assess using one color in today's class, but will have them assess in another color in a future class then compare their results. A very clever and fun way to get young kids to measure length and time in Athletics. I love it Andy!! Please see assessment sheet below.