Peer Observation in Grade 1 Athletics Unit

As part of my grade one Athletics Unit, the students are working on different forms of running, jumping, and throwing. In today's class, I had my students practicing their running technique after we had a very important discussion about what good running looks like. We watched some of the older students, in high school, running the 200 meters on the track. The first thing that they noticed was how smooth the good runners looked and that they had stayed in their lanes. 

I then demonstrated what poor running looks like, it was quite comical in nature, but the point was for them to immediately compare good running vs poor running. They mentioned that I was all over the place, side to side, lane to lane while running. We were able to conclude that good runners run in as straight a line as possible. I then took them on to the field and asked them to look around and to think of ways that we could work on improving our running technique. They came up with the idea of using lines on the field to run on. 

I was hoping that they would think of this and once they did, I introduced the idea of them observing one another while running or having a coach's eye. They loved thinking of themselves as teachers or coaches. I put them into pairs and for about 10-12 minutes they took turns running on the lines on the field and closely observing one another. They provided immediate feedback and as I walked around, I could see that they were very engaged in the task. I have included a short video below of what this lesson looked like in action. 

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