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Articulating a #Physed curriculum ELC – G12
School Architecture, 1921 by Learn From. Build More. CC BY SA This Monday is one of our first in-school Professional Development days and within this day there is a block of time for Heads of Dept (HoD) to run PD with their Dept. A quick poll and Start of year discussion with my team indicated that we needed to take time to continue the Articulation of our YIS PE curriculum and Monday seems the perfect opportunity to apply 2 hours of time to developing this plan. Yokohama International School has a very unique problem for an International School – it has very limited space. A lot of the sorts of…
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Can you Create an amazing Presentation?
As teachers we tend to present regularly to our students. I have found that as I have more experience and grow as a learner that I am starting to share more with my peers and have just started to give presentations to my colleagues too. Now I don’t know if pre-service teachers get more advice these days about how to create presentations, but we certainly didn’t when I studied at University. In the days of digital presentations and collaboration with our audience online, there are so many ways in which we should and could consider our Presentations. Today we had some internal PD with Jolan Martinez, who is a creative…
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Student Leadership and ES Sports Day
P1090788 by Paul O CC BY Spring is in the air, the Cherry Blossoms are poised to burst into bloom and so our Elementary Sports Day looms close. Last year I blogged about Sports Day ideas with Doug Gleddie and I wanted to share what we are hoping to do this year as part of a two or three year plan for evolving our ES Sports Day. We evaluated our plan and day from last year. We felt that although the students had a lot of fun, the day needed to align more closely with our philosophy of PE at YIS. Now we don’t have a written down statement but the sentiment is that…
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MYP Next Chapter for PHE – initial thoughts jumping in…
Cliff Jumping by Barney Moss CC BY Last August, Yokohama Int’l School (YIS) transitioned into the MYP‘s Next Chapter. Our PhysEd department has set itself the task of taking 12 months to digest the four new criterion. We are finding this is not an easy task, as the new criterion at first look appear straightforward but half way through the year we are finding this task rather daunting. I would like to share some of the work that we have been doing and ask others to comment on the way in which they are using the four criterions in their schools. Below are the four PHE Criterion. I have listed…
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Back to School Night
Speech Bubble by Alice Bartlett CC BY SA Back to School Night is probably found in every school in every country, possibly you call it something different at your school. It is the night where parents are invited to come into the school and informally meet teachers and receive information about what their children will be covering in their courses in the academic year. What I am interested in knowing is how Physical Education teachers use this night to showcase their PE programme. Last year was my first year at YIS and I didn’t want to make major changes, I went with the flow of the department and looked at…
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Are we asking our students the right questions?
Sensitive Noise/obvious 2 by Milos Milosevic CC BY Last year my PE team at YIS got really into deep conversation about how we assess our students. YIS is an MYP school and so we are required to assess specific criterion and within these criterion we have strands that need to be assessed regularly each semester. At the crunch times (report writing times…) students were being hit up with many homework assessment items and in the PE and Health department, we were finding students weren’t always coping with what was being asked of them in these weeks. This lead to our decision to stop giving homework to students, unless the…
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Dance – Concepts, Visual Learning and Formative Assessment
A few months ago I posted about our Just Dance unit for Grade 7 students. This was a big change for us as Dance educators and has really been a valuable learning tool for our students. As this was so successful for our G7 students, we decided to run a more advanced form of it for our G9 and G10 students. We wanted them to experience a Dance unit that allowed for success for everyone and that ensured we have a chance to formatively assess along the way rather than leaving the final summative assessment as the be-all-end-all of the unit. We also decided to use a Visual Learning approach…
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Nourish – what nourishes you?
19th Nov: Nourish and Flourish by Helen Taylor CC BY NC Nourish – what do you think of when you are trying to explain this word? concept? and what would you talk about? I have been invited to give a 10 minute talk at our school’s Nourish Conference on Well-being and being a recognised PE Geek I am trying to work my way through what to share with a crowd of parents, teachers and students. How do you begin to know what really nourishes you? I have decided to take the chance to look at how technology allows for us to measure some of the ways in which we…