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.

WE MADE IT!

Summer school during a global pandemic is complete! I am so happy to have experienced this with such a wonderful group of kids.

Once they all left the gym for the last time, I wondered if I’d ever see any of them again. I had made plans to go to a couple students basketball games and cheer/football games, but who knows if that is going to happen this school year.

Last Day Fun

My original plan was to bring water balloons in for them. They were going to have to perform different activities and if they won they were going to be able to throw a water balloon at their opponent. I was going to make it optional so if they weren’t comfortable getting wet they didn’t have to. It was supposed to be some last day fun.

But as I went home yesterday, I was headed to the store to stop for some balloons. The more I thought about it, I decided that I won’t bring them in. What if someone was unknowingly allergic, or parents were unhappy with their kids getting hit with water balloons.

I had good intentions, but after some back and forth I just decided not to bring them. Instead I brought donuts. Who doesn’t like donuts?!

I placed them all out separated on a table. I used a paper towel to organize them and make it extremely easy for them to just come up and take them. Kids came up one at a time and got to enjoy their donuts anywhere they wanted in the gym with their friends.

Teacher Assessment

After their donuts, I had them answer four questions about their time in my PE class.

1. What did you like about our PE class?
2. What didn’t you like?
3. What did Ms. D. do well?
4. What could she improve on?
5. Comments:

I told them to be honest. If they didn’t like something then please tell me so I can do better!

After going through their answers I pulled a few that were pretty consistent:

• What did you like about our PE class?

Many of my students said they loved how we were constantly doing activities or playing “fun” games. I noticed early on that they do MUCH better during structured classes vs. free time. Even though I started giving them 20 min of outdoor free time, they knew when it would end and that we were doing to be playing games together after.

• What didn’t you like?

Again just like above, a lot of students’ said they didn’t like the fun Fridays where they had too much free time. They also mentioned that they sometimes liked playing with the other classes, but for the most part they liked when we kept our class together. I posted last week about our class being a little “team”. Myself and my students all felt that. But for next summer, I’ll definitely stay more secluded than merge with the other two classes.

• What did Ms. D do well?

I was extremely happy to see how many kids said they liked how I organized the class. Whether that be moving from activity to activity, game to game or me picking teams. I’m a pretty organized and prepared teacher, and if you picked up on that from some of my posts in this summer school series than I’m doing my job. But the fact that my students can see that, and makes for a better class just makes me want to do even better for my next set of kids.

• What could she improve on?

My favorite answer was when the kids wrote nothing, she was great. But of course that doesn’t help me…just boosts my ego. So besides that, a few kids wrote I could have been better at picking teams. This was mainly from my second class. This is something that I genuinely didn’t realize some kids didn’t like. My afternoon class, most of them like to play boys vs. girls everything, but when I did need to pick teams I split up my talent as best I could from what I saw. I think in the future, I’ll either pre-make teams before they come in, or there is an app called Team Shake, where you can put your students names in, and their athletic levels to create decently even teams. .

• Comments

The comments were really sweet to read. For the kids that did write something (I told them it was optional) wrote things like “Ms. D is so nice!” or “I actually enjoyed PE”.

But my favorite response without a doubt was the student who wrote, “after 4 years, I actually enjoyed school”. Instant tears. I read them in private so the students did not see me getting emotional, but I know who wrote that, and I was so happy to have made his school career just a little better for him.

Activities

I arranged some lead up games for the students to play together. We started off with Bump, 3 Point Shoot and then a game of Lightning. I arranged their teams all different ways and we did whole class games, and then broke off into smaller groups. Each student was able to have their own ball and stay socially distanced.

For a break, I let students either relax or they could still play. My morning class decded to mostly break except for a few kids who stayed playing basketball, and my afternoon kids just walked around or used a volleyball to pass back and forth.

After our break, I split the kids into two teams and we went outside to play soccer. We haven’t done an actual game of soccer yet, and I didn’t really plan on it because of social distancing while playing offence or defense near the ball. Since we went outside, we were able to really scatter out on the field making the game playable.

My afternoon class played another game of Ultimate football. They got really good at it, and enjoyed the fast paced back and forth.

After our assessment, donuts, lead up games inside, break and outdoor soccer/ultimate football we had about 30 minutes left of class. We spent it outside together playing on the field with the big bouncy balls I would bring out, or just walking the track. My afternoon kids were definitely tapped out from taking their health final in the morning and then working so hard in PE.

Overall

I’m happy summer school is over (so I can sleep in), but I’m also going to miss my little crew. Some of them followed me on my teacher Instagram page so they can still get some physical activity motivation.

Like I’ve said in previous posts…teaching during this pandemic wasn’t so bad. BUT, we had limited students and I have so much room. I am very nervous to go back to my regular school year job. I will be seeing over 250 kids a week, in their classroom or our tiny gym with no outdoor space. I love my regular school year job, kids and co workers, but I can say with certainty that I have major doubts that it’s going to go smoothly like it did for the other districts summer school program.

Anyways, I hope you have enjoyed following my journey! Please subscribe to get more PE related content OR to see my different health habits or tricks to keep you motivated. I’m not only a PE teacher, but a Certified Personal Trainer as well. Health and fitness are a huge part of my life.