July 27th

The morning started off a little rough. I taught a basketball lesson but we only did one drill for about 5 minutes because for the last day, we wanted to play as much as possible. Explaining the boxing out drill was harder than I thought and dividing the number of students into equal teams I kind of blanked on. Once they got going though, they did exactly what I asked them to do and they actually did it pretty well. We did continuous basketball again but we had the whole court. 2 games went on at once using half courts and one team stood in the middle waiting for a team to get a basket. It was a great way to have everyone moving. I blanked for a good 3 minutes and Kim pretty much took over making even teams, she also knows them a lot better and did it by ability.

Second session was free but I helped Tim (the head of P.E.) set up all the food for the faculty meeting. Once morning tea came, we had to take all the food over to the student center, where the entire faculty met up and the principal went over a few announcements.

I finally learned speedball during session 3. The students in this class have been talking about it since day one and since European handball is part of it, we decided it was good timing to start the game. It’s played on a soccer field and It has a combination of soccer, European handball, AFL, and Gallic football. If the ball is on the ground, it’s soccer rules. Someone can flick the ball up above the knees and if it is caught, that person can run with the ball. That person can get tagged with two hands and it would be a change over. To score, you have to kick it on the ground or out of your hands like a soft punt. With this class, the games always get really intense and since I was learning the game, I joined in. It was A LOT of running but it was tons on fun.

Cameron asked if I felt comfortable enough to teach this session since we were doing the same thing but I really didn’t feel confident enough in explaining the rules since I was very confused for a while. Session 4 was a bit more challenging. Last session we had maybe 20 students, now we had 45. They are also younger, more immature and more girls who just stand around and do nothing. We started with 3 stations of punting, dribbling and juggling the soccer balls. We split them up into three groups of 15 for the games. It took a lot longer for these students to understand the game and get into it. Hopefully next time we play, we can give another option to those who rather do something else because having so many people stand around ruins the game.

Sometimes I wish I could always just play the sports or activities with the students instead of reffing. While everyone was playing basketball first session, I really wanted to join and thankfully I got my chance in the afternoon and had an amazing time. It also makes my relationships stronger with the students when you join in.