Welcome back to the 20 days of summer school physical education series! If you are just joining this series, stop right now and check out Summer School Physical Education: Day 1. What Works and What Doesn’t.
The post above details what I will be talking about day to day, and how it can help you improve your social distancing physical education classes in the fall. It also lays out my class size, class time frames and space I am able to use.
If you are currently teaching summer school physical education, please leave comments on what works for you! I love collaborating, so let me know what you’re up to.
Activity #1: Outdoor Free Time
This was only given to my afternoon class. After them sitting in health for 3 hours and then eating lunch, I always like to give them time to wake up. A little sunshine sometimes does the trick.
We spent 20 minutes out here. Some kids just walked the track, and a few others played around on the football field with a soccer ball, and a small group of girls practiced their volleyball hits.
Activity #2: Fitness Notebooks
Since the morning class did not go outside for free time, we still did our 40-50ish minute fitness notebooks outdoors. A lot of the kids are really getting the hang of it, and enjoying seeing their workouts get better each week.
My afternoon had already spend 20 minutes outside to wake up, so we did our fitness notebooks in the weight room. I cut their time down to about 30 minutes, just so we would have plenty of time to get all our daily activities in.
I am starting to notice a pattern with one of my new kids in the afternoon. The student rarely does any work, so I had to talk with them privately. My class is easy, but if you don’t put any work into it what’s the point?
Activity #3: Nitroball
Once students came in from either outside or the weight room, they were able to take a 15 minute break. I stressed during this break that their hands need to be washed, because we would be using 2 volleyballs.
After hands were washed, I had them sit in their floor spots to listen to directions.
How to play:
This game is almost identical to volleyball, only you play with nets low to the ground and you can allow bounces. This is a great lead up game to regular volleyball.
Points, positions, boundaries, serves, hits and rotations are exactly the same in volleyball, only now when a ball is served to your side, you can let it bounce once before you hit it. If I am the first of my team to hit and it does not make it over the net, my teammates can help me by either hitting it over, or letting it bounce than hitting it over.
Each side still gets three times to try to get the ball back to their opponents, and you cannot hit the ball twice in a row.
Bounces do not have to be taken, but it allows you to set up and get under the ball for a cleaner hit.
What Worked:
Small classes, and two separate courts worked in our favor. The maximum number of students on one team was 4, giving them more interaction with the ball.
We have the room to add another couple courts, so I may set them up to put off to the side, and when students get some down time if they want to play 2 on 2 or even 1 on 1 with their own nets that could be possible.
As the 4 teams practiced, I was actively moving and helping them understand the game. Once everyone was pretty comfortable, I moved two teams so everyone would be playing different opponents, and added music. The mood picked up immediately and students really started to get into it.
Improvements or Modifications:
Normally when I play this game, I play with a light airy ball. We only have standard volleyballs, but in the future I would try out a few different balls. The regular ones still worked great, but if I am going to modify a game, I like to have a variety of different ways to play.
Like I said earlier, we could add courts to make the teams smaller. That means less hands on 1 ball to eliminate unnecessary contact.
We are also using Pickleball nets, since the other PE teachers are hogging the nets again, because for some reason they are STILL playing 3 hours of Badminton, but it works. You could honestly use anything you want.
Activity #4: Winners Court – NirtroBall
I kept the same teams, and numbered each team 1-4. Court 1 was the winners court, and court 4 was the “not winners” court. I don’t like calling any of my kids losers.
If you win a game, you move up (unless you are already at court 1…you just stay where you are). If you lose you move back (unless you are already at court 4…you stay where you are). This always gets the kids hyped up. They play a little harder, because who doesn’t want to be in that #1 spot?
What WOrked:
Surprisingly every team got to play a different opponent in the first class. It’s just the way the way the teams won and lost.
Letting them experience different levels of athleticism from differnt teams, helped them understand the game better, and this is where their individual or team strategies started to come through. If you were on the winners and second place courts (1 and 2), you obviously were trying your best to win. My last place team who unfortunately didn’t win any games, stayed at court 4, but never let up effort wise each team they played.
I watched them to see if they were getting frustrated, but surprisingly they weren’t. They were great sports about how the games were being played, and never let their losing streak get in the way of their team dynamic.
The afternoon classes volleyball skills are AMAZING. I know a lot of the girls like volleyball, but I didn’t realize it was almost all of them. There I split the girls up first and distributed their talent evenly on each court then filtered in the boys. But the boys were good too! We had really intense games going on every court, making their class a ton of fun to watch.
Improvements or Modifications:
With more courts and smaller teams, you could create a bigger winners court game. That way students would have more courts to move up in, if they are near the bottom.
I would recommend siting teams up, after the first couple practice rounds we did in activity 3. I only made one change, and it made a huge difference. In my morning class, I had 1 team of 3, and I didn’t realize that one of the girls was extremely inexperienced in volleyball. I moved another girl from a team that seemed to do really well with the game onto the team of 3. This helped tremendously, and made their now team of 4 do much better.
There was only one person who did not seem to enjoy anything about the game. She put zero effort into it. Luckily her team was very encouraging towards her, and would try to help her with her serves. I even helped her a few times, or had her move up from the serving line or try again. I love the fairness these kids play with. They understood she wasn’t as good as the rest of them, but instead of yelling THAT’S NOT FAIR, if I told her to try again and move closer, the encouraged her through her serve.
So when it comes to modifications, let them move closer if they need. Tell your kids if its a point we can’t figure out if we should count or not, just have them replay it. Because I can’t see every play with four teams playing, so I tell them to use their best judgement and they just do. I really lucked out with a great group of high schoolers.
Activity #5: Full Court Nitroball
This was somewhat a spur of the moment decision. In my morning class, they had done two practice rounds, then 3 more rounds in the winners court game, and we still had 30 minutes of class left.
I originally had planned that one side would be the pro court, meaning if you wanted to seriously play, no modifications with serving, and points were to be kept you’d go here and re-pick teams. The other court would be a more leisure game, not to be taken as seriously so the kids who were not enjoying it as much with with the dominant play to win type kids, could feel comfortable playing even if making mistakes.
To my surprise, every single kid walked to the pro court, so as a class we decided to push the nets together and play a 7 vs 8 full court game using the basketball court as our boundaries. I stayed back to assess for a few minutes then jumped in on the team who was down a player.
It was so much fun! I always tell the kids I play no mercy, so try your hardest to beat me. My team ended up losing by a couple points so I guess the joke was on me.
But we had so much fun as a class, that I decided we’d do the same thing with the afternoon class as well.
What Worked:
The fact that both classes loved this game and got to play as a class was the best part. There was still plenty of room for us to social distance. If you are having a hard time visualizing 8 vs 8 (this includes me), just picture 8 kids on one side of a basketball court, and 8 on the other.
No one was running into each other. Lots of great teamwork was happening, because students were calling for the ball when it was near them. This prevented collisions and teammates getting into their personal or social distanced space.
Improvements or Modifications:
Playing with a big airy bouncy ball would have been really fun, but honestly it was still a great time with the regular volleyball.
Like I said, you can pick and choose what balls you want to use.
For the morning kids we did co-ed teams, and for the afternoon they really enjoy boys vs. girls. After one full game, I made the afternoon class do co-ed for about 15 minutes. I can tell who likes to be around who, and I always try to accommodate for that along with their skill levels.
Overall:
This week, we are playing mostly net games. Keep an eye out the rest of the week for volleyball, round robin volleyball, badminton, round robin badminton, and tennis.
You’ll of course see mini games, and fitness included as well. I never spend more than 45-50 minutes on the same activity, because the kids will get bored. You’ll notice even today my winners court game ran 40 minutes, but the kids were constantly changing up who they were playing.