Each week you can see the activities that our students were engaged in as well as many of the resources I used in my teaching. I put out these weekly posts for parents to see what their child is learning in PE as well as for other PE teachers to get ideas they can implement in their own program.
This week our students worked on some basketball skills that focused on ball handling and dribbling. The kids got lots of individual practice using a ball of their choice. Students could choose between a regular basketball, a mini-basketball, or a 7" rubber playground ball. I encourage students to experiment with different types of equipment to find the one they like and works best for them.
Day 1 Lessons:
Day 1 started off with a warmup of some individual ball handling progressions. Students got a chance to follow along with a video demonstrating different challenges and try each one. Below are snippets of a few of our K-2 skills and grades 3-5 skill progressions.
Next we moved into some practice activities to work on our dribbling skills with grades K-2. These 2 activities also helped reinforce our procedure of our "class signal" which is music. For "Dribble Stop & Go" we used a "freeze dance" type of activity that used music on - we start dribbling (or bouncing & catching), music off - we stop and hold our ball. Once students demonstrated they could start & stop on the signal, they got into partner pairs and took turns being the leader and the follower. The leader dribbled anywhere around the gym and the follower followed them. When the music stopped, they switched roles.
The last couple minutes of class are spent practicing our line up procedures of putting our equipment away, gathering our personal belongings, and lining up on our kid code numbers to get ready to leave. Here's a peek as to what that looks like...
Our intermediate students (grades 3-5) moved into a skill practice activity called "Dribble for Treasure" after their ball handling progression warmup. This activity helped students to keep eyes up when dribbling and to move to open spaces while moving at their preferred speed.
Day 2 Lessons -
Day 2 this week focused on ball handling/dribbling skills again, but also working with a partner. Students in grades 3-5 warmed up by following along with this "partner basketball skills" video.
Before we could move into our skill application activity, I needed to set up some foam pins and other equipment. I had students participate in this simple "Partner Lap Dribbling" activity as I finished setting up for "Partner Pin Dribble."
This was our culminating dribbling activity where students attempted to dribble their ball through the obstacles (foam pins) without knocking any over. If successful, they got to collect a popsicle stick. Once they had six sticks, they traded them in for a wristband. If their ball knocked over a pin, they lost a stick. At the end of the game, the multiplied the number of wristbands they collected times 6 and then added any remaining sticks they had to determine their total score. Then both partners added their individual scores together to come up with a group score.
Day 2 with my K-2 students began with another ball-handling/dribbling progression video HERE. Then we moved into a modified version of "Dribble for Treasure" where I allowed them to either dribble or bounce/catch as they traveled across the gym to collect the beanbags. Then we determined winners by using our "Color Champions" system where we count up the various colored of beanbags to determine which group has the most of a particular color.
And after a lesson and a half of playing ball handling & dribbling games, my kindergarten students needed another active outlet for about the last 5-7 minutes. So, I had them each take a bucket, set it up anywhere they wanted, and shoot some baskets. They LOVED it! They got to practice shooting at a target from a variety of distances.