Inculcation Of Values: Physical Education In Class
Physical education is being taught nowadays as a subject in primary schools, which focuses on the development of physical fitness and the ability to perform and enjoy day-to-day physical activities with ease. Learners are likely to participate in consistent, safe, enjoyable and engaging movement and physical activity as part of the national curriculum. Learners like to learn new things and by integrating other subjects for example values and maths, into their daily physical education lessons, is one of the best platforms to support it. Using numeracy race and football are some of the activities that can develop learners not only physically, but emotionally, socially and cognitively as well as inculcate values in them.
Values can be inculcated to the young through physical activities as it gives direction and meaning to their life. While planning and implementing those two above lessons, as a trainee holistic educator, I tried to inculcate basic values to the learners for their holistic growth and to make them aware of the challenges in life they might face if they do not apply them. In the numeracy lesson, the students needed to check and help his/her classmate in the numeracy equation before they throw it in the correct hoop. Both students need to cooperate and be honest to each other while doing the mental calculation.
One of the first steps in setting up cooperative learning is to plan for specific group dynamics. This can be accomplished if we, as educators, understand their roles when working with groups and how groups should be structured. I planned a competition level for both activities, thus while implementing the lesson, I have divided the class in two teams by making them standing next to each other and count ‘one’ and ‘two’ alternately, in order for the students to work with those whom they are not used to. As a team, they will have to perform together and cooperate to achieve the goal of the activity in an effective manner. Justification of the choice of activities.
I considered suitable choice of the two activities as means of developing students' ability to work together for the success of a cooperative action, involving at the same time the improvement of individual performance, growth and development of each student in both academic and holistically. First of all, I have considered integrating mathematics in the numeracy race in order for the students to perform the activity physically by running and by throwing to develop the psychomotor skills and at the same time develop the cognitive skills by doing mental calculation. Then, by integrating English language football vocabulary, I considered that students to learn new word even it is football and play the mini football match to use the skills learnt to score goal(s). Also, in the two activities, I have provided a competition level thus they had to work in a team and as a team bringing cooperation and team spirit as well as to respect opponents’ team. Explanation of how and why “teaching values through physical education” activities would have differed for lower primary.
Implementing the two activities in lower primary, it would have been different as there many aspects of the lessons which would be needed to be taken into consideration. First of all, in the numeracy race, I would have brought the addition and subtraction between the numbers 1 to 10 only rather than 1 to 100. The pathway would have been reduced as well due to lower primary pupils would get tired easily. Thus, maybe there would have been no competition level as such because those pupils wold have focussed more on their individual perspectives rather than as a team. Concerning the mini football match, they would not have known much skills and techniques such as controlling and passing the ball correctly. Also, the size of the pitch might be reduced due to the pupils could not run long distance. It would have been difficult to play the match, as there would not have that team spirit and collaboration that it should have within a team.
