InTASC #1
The teacher understands how learners grow and develop, recognizing that patterns of learning and development vary individually within and across the cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional, and physical areas, and designs and implements developmentally appropriate and challenging learning experiences (InTASC, 2013).
Introduction to Physical and Health Education for Teachers
As teachers, we need to set the standard of physical fitness in our classrooms and the community to encourage and demonstrate a healthy lifestyle for ourselves and our students.
Description
My fall semester of 2017 in my Introduction to Physical and Health Education for Teachers class, we created a physical education website that parents and teachers can use as an informative resource. Included in the website is a lesson plan that our students, as well as future students, could partake in; this was a hands-on physical activity of an obstacle course that also encompassed aspects of standard one.
Analysis of what I Learned
After completing this activity, I gained a deeper understanding of all the components it takes to create a lesson plan that can be used for all students. There will be students in my classroom that could have learning disabilities and I will need to adapt my lesson plans to fit their best needs. A subsection of our lesson plan we listed ways that our obstacle course could accommodate learners with disabilities as well as English Language Learns. Throughout the creation process, we were told to think about a substitute teacher walking in and being able to teach based off of what we made. That situation made me really think about clearly defining our procedures and making sure that we clearly stated the areas of our lesson plan that met the standard. As a group, we knew that most children love a good challenge and games, so when we created our obstacle course we wanted to make sure that it was something that kids would enjoy. However, the issues we faced we were unaware of how physical we should make it based on different children's' skill level. I overcame this problem by using my resource of the Indiana Department of Education Physical Education Standards to uncover what skills second graders should already have and what they should be working on. I have gained my first lesson plan writing experience from this course and that first process is something that will stick with me the rest of my career. Through creating the website I learned all of the different resources that teachers are able to use and that we can help give to parents as well. When covering a sensitive topic like body image, we want to make sure that parents and other members of the community can use strong resources. After exploring the internet, I found that a lot are better than others.
Demonstration of my Competence
I have proven my self-competent in standard number one by creating a realistic and accurate lesson plan that is appropriately challenging based off the physical education standards and covers all developmental areas of standard number one by covering cognitive, linguistic, social, emotional, and physical areas. We combined cognitive, social, linguistic, and physical together by working and communicating with partners while going through the obstacle course and thinking about where they had to step. Before creating our procedures we did research on theorist of how children grow, develop, and learn so we could design a truly beneficial activity. While writing this plan, we knew that we would have students that already had the skill set necessary to complete the course. However, we also knew that children vary individually, so some students would be better at certain parts than other children and vice versa. We adapted the layout to have several different physical challenges so that students could be challenged yet still accomplish the obstacles and grow within the strengths and weaknesses. We connected with the community by covering an important area of health by discussing issues with body image that face our society today. We connected links to different websites and resources where people could continue to grow their knowledge and develop a positive outlook on body image.