Middle School

Hello,
Sorry I did not post the entire month of November...things are a little busy around here, not to mention my sister got married over Thanksgiving break so on top of school there has been a lot going on for me.

The subject of my blog today is class content and adapting to middle school students.  When I graduated from Cedarville I had every intention of being a high school PE teacher, but now I find myself teaching at the middle school level.  Although it wasn't my ideal job, I have grown to love what I do.  There were a lot of things that I had to learn early this year in order to be a successful teacher.  I couldn't teach PE as I had learned during my student teaching or during my first year out of college as a long term high school PE substitute.  I really had to adjust my ideas and methods of teaching to fit with who I was teaching.

The first thing I had to learn was to be a bit nicer to the students.  I couldn't be as hard on my middle school students as I had been to my students at the high school level.  Middle school students are very sensitive and you have to be a bit more careful of their emotional well being.  Sarcasm must be limited because they tend to take things very seriously.  When you discipline, you must do so calmly and be sure they understand exactly why they are receiving this punishment otherwise they will twist what you said and turn it into a much bigger issue. 

The second thing I learned to change was my expectation on the students.  You have to be more lenient, forgiving, and gracious with the middle school group.  They make a lot of ridiculous decisions and comments and they don't have complete control over their bodies yet.  You have to be kind and understanding of their age.  I'm not trying to say they need to be babied, but they do need more attention than a group of high school students.  What they are looking for is your approval and your support.  They need much more encouragement and praise for trying.

My class content needed to be altered as I changed from teaching high schoolers to middle schoolers.  Middle school is a very awkward time for the students physically.  They do well with additional practice with hand-eye coordination and with basic locomotor movements.  Relays work really well as a warm up to practice these things, not to mention the students love the competition of a relay.  In my class we do a lot of relays with crab walking, frog hops, bear crawling, skipping, jumping, wheel barrow, running, skipping, sliding, etc.  All of these movements help the students break out of their awkward physical stage.  Not only did my warm up have to change, but also the meat of what I was teaching had to be adjusted.  I take my time as I teach each sport unit.  For example, we spent 5 weeks in our volleyball unit this year.  I gave detailed instruction for each skill (serving, setting, passing), I performed a lot of skills test on my students and we played a lot of lead up games.  By the end of the unit, my students had really improved because I took my time to allow them to grow.  In high school, I did not need to be as thorough. In between each sport unit, we spend a few days playing cooperative games.  My students favorites are dodge ball (of course) and anything similar to kickball.

*Don't worry Coach Freese, I've only played dodge ball with them once this year.* :)