JUMP ROPE UNIT

 

Shared by Sara Fernández: 

This organization is proposed to be carried out throughout the teaching unit. At the end of the unit, students must be able to perform different jump rope skills and tricks, individually and in pairs, in short rope, long rope and double dutch (two ropes).

Firstly, the teacher must present the students the cards they will work with throughout the unit. They contain the explanation of the exercise to be carried out, with the steps to follow and some tips they have to pay attention to. In addition, it specifies the tricks that they must previously control to achieve the one they are in.

In this case, I have 25 students, so I begin making groups of 5 people. Each group is going to work out in one trick, so at the end of this phase, there will be 5 students capable to do one trick and 5 five different tricks.

The teacher hands out one card to each group, so the have a few minutes to analyse it and practice the skill. After 6 or 7 minutes each group is ready to teach the others that skill.

Now we have to reorganise the groups again. One person from each group will be a member of a new one. Therefore, in each group there are the five tricks that they must teach to each other. They can always use the card to help themselves, not to show it to their classmates and leave them free to practise. They can also request some help from a person of the previous group.

The same dynamic can be repeated with the skills and tricks they can make in pairs or small groups.

Self assessment:

I carried out this activity with students of 4º ESO. It is great to see them teaching their classmates and even trying to do tricks together without asking them for it.

A good planification is essential. Number of lessons, number of tricks you want the students to learn, how many tricks can they learn each lesson. I, as a teacher, cannot give them 4 or 5 tricks to do during the class and forget until the bell rings. The teacher needs to check continuously their achievements, because this activity is like an engine, if a piece fails (group) the rest of the class cannot continue.

The most important consideration I think, it to have the groups organization very clear, so you can organize easier the class and the students understand better. The next time I carry out the activity, I guess I have to name the groups not with numbers, because the tricks also have numbers, so I is confusing for them.

For future attempts, I think I would use a big stopwatch, to improve the organization of each step. Making the working time visible for everyone I think will help the groups to be more productive and effective. That is one of the things that did not go as I expected. Some groups got distracted easily, so they were not ready to move to the next step when others did.