Resource 4: How Mr Nyamekye taught his lesson

 Background information / subject knowledge for teacher

Here are the stages Mr Nyamekye used in his lesson:

1. He instructed the pupils to talk, in pairs, about their favourite games and list them. This took ten minutes.
2. To do the survey, he asked a volunteer pupil to come to the front of the class and ask each pair which game they had chosen.
3. He wrote the game on the board and put one tick next to it. If it was a game someone else had already mentioned, he just added a tick. The list on the board started to look like this:
   • Football ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
   • Skipping ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
   • Tag ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
   • Catch ✓ ✓ ✓ ✓
   • Marbles ✓ ✓ ✓
4. The survey took 15 minutes to complete. Next, he asked which game was most popular and which least popular.
5. He asked the class to get into seven groups of five. He gave each group one game and asked them to write a description for the class of how to play it.
6. He asked them to read their instructions to the class.

There were too many games to describe in one lesson so he decided to do one new game during the last lesson of each day.

To help with this, he gave each group the name of a day of the week. Now each group knew when they should give their description. At the beginning of each day, he asked whose turn it was today.

These lessons used the following format:

1. First, the group gave their description of the game and demonstrated it in front of the whole class. This took about ten minutes.
2. Then all the other groups practised playing the game as well. If necessary, Mr Nyamekye took them outside. This took 15 minutes.
3. Next, he asked them to think about new ways of playing the game, particularly if there were children who found the game difficult to join in with. This helped them to remember what they had learned in class that day.
4. Each group came up with different ideas for adapting the game. This discussion usually lasted about 15 minutes.
5. Finally, they discussed some of the changes and tried them out together until the end of the lesson.

This way, Mr Nyamekye started using his pupils’ games to help with teaching different subjects. The best ideas he used again. Also, the pupils started playing the new learning games in their free time.