1. Focus on planning
It is important to prepare yourself for lessons by checking your own subject knowledge. Read Resource 1: Introduction to physical development to refresh your understanding.
You need to think carefully about how you will introduce this topic. Just reading out information and hoping that the pupils understand is not the best way for most pupils to learn. You need to plan your lesson carefully, thinking about what will happen at each stage of the lesson and finding out what they already know and think. See Key Resource: Planning and preparing your lessons [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] for further information.
Each lesson should have a particular learning outcome (intention). In this case, you want the pupils to be able to identify the four basic things that contribute to improved physical development.
For each stage of the lesson, you need to answer three questions:
- How does this activity contribute to the learning outcome?
- What will the pupils be doing to help them learn?
- What will I be doing to support them?
Look at the games and activities you could use. Which ones will support your learning outcomes?
Case Study 1: Considering physical development when organising your classroom
Biduga teaches in a small school in a rural area of Tanzania. This term, her colleague Mary is on maternity leave, so she is teaching a large, multigrade class of 85 pupils from Grades 3–6. This means that she has to deal with a large number of children at different stages of physical development. Biduga knows she needs to consider this when organising her classroom.
She has noticed that the older children often take responsibility for some of the younger children. So, she organises the class into groups, each with a group name and a Grade 6 ‘leader’. The leader checks that each child is present, and gets their group settled and ready for study.
She also finds that the younger children enjoy having many different activities in a lesson. She plans lessons with two strands of activities: one for Grades 5–6 and one for Grades 3–4:
- First, she gives Grades 5–6 some group work or longer exercises.
- Then, she spends time with Grades 3–4, using shorter activities, including simple games.
This means preparing lessons with more stages for Grades 3–4. See Key Resource: Working with large classes and Key Resource: Working with multigrade classes.
In this way, Biduga has recognised the differences in her pupils’ physical development and is using it to help plan her teaching.
Activity 1: Planning a lesson on physical development
Resource 1 covers the four principles that contribute to physical development. Write a lesson plan to introduce these four principles to your pupils.
Identify the activities and resources you will use. You could adapt the ‘same or different’ activity from Section 1 of this module but look at similarities and differences in physical growth e.g. height, shoe size, hand and arm length.
Plan your lesson like this:
- Introduction to the lesson and intended learning outcomes.
- Introduce the ideas in Resource 1, using pupils’ previous knowledge.
- In groups or pairs, the pupils do a ‘same and different’ activity or your own activity.
- The pupils do another similar activity so you can check their understanding.
Resource 2: Planning ways to introduce the four principles of physical development gives you more guidance on organising the lesson and gathering resources to support your teaching.
After the lesson, make some notes for yourself about how it went:
- Was it successful? What did your pupils learn?
- Did any part not work so well? If so, why was this?
- What would you do differently next time?
Section 2: Planning physical growth and development sessions