Promoting physical activity

This session was planned in order for us to realize that not all kind of games suit with the objectives of physical education.

As the class before, the warm up games were designed so as to children, or us, could be creative while doing the warm up. Once again, I understood that in this part of the class children do not have to follow the teacher, but they can do things perfectly on their own and have fun as well.

Then, we started to deal with a new concept: tag games, which are the most simple kind of games that can be performed in PE classes. The teacher chose four traditional games and we played them. The games were: steal the bacon; relay race; duck, duck, goose and team tails. All of them had in common that they did not promote physical activity since movement was performed only by a few students while others were waiting or because there were eliminated. This does not mean that this kind of traditional games should be avoided, notwithstanding we have to make some modifications so as to make them valid. 

                       

As an example of this, the teacher explained us a variation of the game team tails in which elimination was replaced by a new rule that involved collaboration among mates. As a result, we were not only promoting physical activity but also cooperation.

From my point of view, this session was really interesting because it made us realize that not all games promote physical activity, which is after all, our main objective. Nevertheless, I would also like to highlight the importance of imagination in this job. As we have seen, not all the games are suitable as they are, but we can adapt them with creativity and work. As a matter of fact, this can be really useful not only in order to avoid elimination but also to adapt traditional games to practice sports, as I have done with my basketball trainings.