With my first week of social distanced and at-home PE learning in the books, I am now including the Sportsmanship Social Distancing Version to the free resources section. This lesson always starts off my year, as it helps define one of the core tenets of our PE classroom, and it connects very well to the Montessori philosophy of Grace and Courtesy. It can be used at any time during the year as well, especially when they need reminders on how to be fun to play with, and fun to play against.

Here is a link to the free resources page with our first social distanced Montessori PE game

Sportsmanship (Social Distanced Version)

I am also working on Sportsmanship at-home version that works well for PE teachers who need to teach lots of students over Zoom or some other conferencing platform. I hope to have that written up by next week, but I need to do a little more additional testing next week.

One thing that I realized I was taking for granted, until it wasn’t working perfectly, was the technology involved in this new landscape. The efforts of our IT department have not gone unnoticed, as they are working everyday to make sure our internet is stable and fast. However, with half the school on the internet Zooming from one area to the other, the demands have been heavy on the system. In the middle of explaining the rules or the debrief, I often lagged or became momentarily frozen, which would kill the momentum of the explanation. I had to accept that it was going to happen and move forward, but it was frustrating knowing that not that long ago I could be saying these things in person.

I hope your school years have been successful so far, and that you are staying safe. This year is going to be a marathon. One week felt like a month, so we are going to have to take it week by week.