Hey Reader!
I hope you've had a great week! Lately, I've been talking a lot about vision and what it means to be vision-driven. This week, I'd like to show you what it looks like when you start to build a curriculum with a long-term vision in mind.
To achieve this, I want to briefly walk you through the games units that I ran in each of the three grades that I teach in PE: primary (kindergarten), grade one, and grade two.
Let's dive in!
The Curriculum Thread
When I was designing the scope and sequence for the outcomes that I would build my PE program around at Kings County Academy (KCA, the P-8 public school where I teach), I knew that there needed to be a learning focus dedicated to helping students develop their game sense. After all, the region where my students are growing up provides a variety of opportunities for kids, youth, and adults to engage in both sport and games. This engagement isn't limited to participation as an athlete. It also includes opportunities to watch and appreciate sports that are culturally significant to us folks who live in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley.
The Game Sense learning theme within my curriculum (which falls under the Movement Competence learning area) is all about helping develop "thinking players". The theme is broken down into three learning focuses:
- Tactical Awareness
- Strategic Play
- Game Appreciation
Today isn't about the nitty-gritty of the outcomes that my program is built upon. Instead, I want to show you how those outcomes come to life across multiple grades.
Primary: Games, Goals, & Rules
With my primary students, the focus of our games unit was to understand that games have goals and rules.
Understanding the goal of a game makes it easier for you to know what to do when playing that game with your friends (i.e. goals give us direction). We explored the concept of goals in games through simple team-based activities such as Jake The Hungry Snake and Sharks and Minnows
When it came to rules, we learned that rules are agreements that keep games friendly, flowing, fair, and fun. I created the Play By The Rules poster to serve as an anchor chart while we explored the role of rules in games.
The purpose of this unit was to help students be able to think about games in terms of their goals and rules. By developing an understanding of both, students can participate in games with a better sense of confidence and purpose.
Grade One: Goals, Plans, and Parts
By grade one, the focus of the games unit was to understand that in order to achieve a team's goal, every player need to understand and play their part.
The Play Your Part poster that I made helped introduce this idea by using a puzzle analogy:
🎯 The goal is to put the puzzle together.
🗺️ The plan is the strategy you'll use to achieve your goal, such as starting off by building the edges of the puzzle.
🧩 Your part is the role you play within your team's plan. It can be thought of as the pieces that you are responsible for finding and connecting to the puzzle.
Focusing on your part within your team's plan gives your play direction and purpose. To help students explore this, the unit was built around Benchball: a modified, 3v3 version of soccer.
Within Benchball, players got to rotate through three roles while on the court, with each role having a simplified part to play:
⚔️ Forwards attack.
🛡️ Backs protect.
🔗 Middles help.
To support my students' learning and help them keep track of which role they were playing, I spray painted numbers onto our class set of pinnies and created this set of Player Role Cards.
At the start of each game, each number was assigned to a role. I used a simple magnet system to help students (and me lol) keep track of who was playing what role, so that I could support students accordingly.
By the end of the unit, the goal was for students to step onto the court knowing exactly what they could do within their role to support their team's goal. This helped students develop an understanding of what it feels like to play with purpose and intention, and to ask clarifying questions to make sure that they understand a) their team's goal and b) their part in helping their team achieve that goal. This approach made the game feel less overwhelming to students who had been hesitant to play in competitive games. It also resulted in students feeling successful within their roles (e.g. "I saved a goal", "I made a great pass", "I took a shot on net").
Grade Two: Long-Term Goals, Strategic Play, and Organizational Success
The focus of the grade two games unit was to have students work together as both a team and a team organization to achieve a long-term goal.
To achieve this, I designed a modified Sport Education season in which students would be assigned to teams and compete in an extended league both as players and organizational members (e.g. coaches, scorekeepers, referees).
The season was called the Q-Tip Superleague and it was one of the biggest undertakings of my school year. There was too much put into making the league a success for me to write about here, so I went ahead and put it all into a blog post on ThePhysicalEducator.com.
To learn more, hit the button below!
Bringing The Vision To Life
By creating this kind of continuity across the grade-levels that I teach, each grade gets to build upon their prior experiences in understanding games and how to contribute to their team's success. It's a long-term effort that is driven by the vision of helping students flourish into "thinking players" who can make sense of games, appreciate games from a variety of facets, and confidently participate in games with their friends.
While the games curriculum thread was definitely an example of how my long-term vision came to life in my teaching this year, it wasn't the only one:
🚴♀️ Cycling Unit: Primaries learn how to pedal → Grade Ones learn the rules of the road so they can safely bike around town → Grade Twos learn how to mountain bike.
🧭 Orienteering Unit: Primaries learn about landmarks → Grade Ones learn how to read maps using landmarks as reference points → Grade Twos use maps and compasses to compete in orienteering challenges.
🏹 Tracking/Hunting Unit: Primaries engage in sensory play in the forest → Grade Ones use their senses to track wildlife in the forest → Grade Twos use their tracking skills to compete in archery-based hunting activities.
With a clear sense of vision, designing my PE program stopped feeling like an overwhelming task and started becoming something that I get to approach with intention and purpose.
One More Thing
Here's what I didn't tell you: none of those units started out clear.
Every single one began as a curriculum outcome that, on its own, told me almost nothing about what to actually teach. The clarity you saw in this email didn't come from the outcomes. It came from a process I've spent years refining, one that takes a vague outcome and turns it into a roadmap I can build a whole unit around.
This summer, I'm going to teach that process to a small group of teachers in something I'm calling The Clarity Cohort.
I'll share all the details next week (dates, what's involved, how to join). For now, I just wanted you to know it's coming. If reading this email left you thinking "I want that kind of clarity, but I don't know where to start," keep an eye on your inbox.
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Happy Teaching!
Joey
Joey Feith
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