PE Link with 'Who We Are' Grade 4 Unit of Inquiry (How effective is peer modeling?)

Grade 4 NIS teacher, Matthew Perry, and his class watching video from previous day's grade 4 class completing adventure challenge task. The peer modeling process unfolding.....

I blogged yesterday about a link I am making in PE with the current 'Who We Are' grade 4 unit of inquiry. In helping to make a connection with the lines of inquiry and the central idea in this UoI, we (the grade 4 teaching team and myself) decided that there was great value in letting the students in one class model how certain games are suppose to be played. As we are doing an adventure challenge unit in PE at the moment, cooperative learning, teamwork, communication, and trust are essential components of what is happening in class. Letting kids model these important skills can be an extremely effective teaching tool. 


The grade 4 class today, taught by Matthew Perry, watched the video on my blog from yesterday's class. They had a whole group discussion about the importance of teamwork, cooperation, risk-taking, being principled, trusting one another, and how to effectively communicate before coming to PE to do the same Human Square challenge as yesterday's class. The concept of yesterday's class modeling for their class was understood. Matthew did a great job at taking it one step further in discussing how they could also model for tomorrow's grade 4 class and that there was a distinct possibility that they will have learned to do the game better than yesterday's class due to having it modeled for them by the peers.

As predicted, there was better communication by Matthew's class and they did in fact do an overall better job than yesterday's class at completing the Human Square challenge. Tomorrow's grade 4 class will also participate in the same challenge and will have a chance to see today's video as well as yesterday's. I believe that there is great merit in a process such as this. Although not integration, these learning experiences will hopefully help the students to genuinely make stronger connections to the current 'Who We Are' unit. 

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