Practical class: parachute

Our first practical class was more tiring than I had expected. We started it playing some warm up games, that allowed students to move freely across the court. I like these games because children (in this case, ourselves) moved the whole body without even realizing it. This means that warming up exercises don't have to be always ruled activities in which the teacher is the leader. Instead, children can be the ones who decide what to move and how to move. The result is the same but the second one is more fun. As I see it, warming up and stretching exercises have to be taken seriously so as to avoid lesions but they also have to be enjoyable since they have to be a daily part of PE classes.

                

After that, we were asked to use a parachute, a kind of material that although having heard about it I had never played with. Parachutes, apart from being really beautiful, turned out to be very amusing as well. During the class, we played the following games:

•          The big mushroom
•          The wave (and ball roll)
•           Running numbers
•           Run under
•          Popcorn game (two teams; pop all the balls off)
•           Center ball (two teams; try to shake the opponent’s ball into the center pocket)
•          Ball shake (two teams)
•          Cat and mouse

                      

All the games had in common that the main goal was to promote the social domain, although each one in different ways. The first two were collaborative games in which the participation of everybody was necessary in order to achieve the goal. Some people might think that parachute games are not tiring, however, it is not true and this is shown with the following activities in which people had to run, shake their arms or even crawl. In my view, "run numbers" was my favourite game because it promoted physical activity and entertainment and everyone was engaged. A conclusion that can be drawn from this activity is that everybody can belong to a great variety of groups, or in other words, that nobody is alone, that we are all the same.

Other games such as ball shake did not work so well in our class because some of the people cheated. This can also had happened in a primary education class, but this could have been used as a great excuse so as to teach values and to tell children that cheating is not fun at all, since the purpose of the game does not worth anymore.

To conclude, the whole class was really enjoyable and we were playing games in which collaboration was needed. What is more, we made a lot of exercise. We only realized it the following day, when stiffness was killing us!