Hello and welcome to the Daily Phys Ed Podcast for Monday the 29th of January. My name is Nathan Horn from iFizzed.com and this is the Daily Phys Ed Podcast, the Daily Physical Education Podcast where I share with you reflections on my teaching practice, tips, techniques, strategies, technology tools and all other things physical education. Thanks for joining us for another week. I am feeling back to 100% health after being a little bit under the weather last week so I do apologise for some of the shorter episodes.
I was having a bit of difficulty speaking for extended periods of time without going into coughing fit so I'm feeling much better this week and so hopefully we'll be better able to reflect upon my teaching practice and the things that are going on in my program and the physical education world in general. Today was a very exciting day. It was the first day of our dance units at Metaridge School here in British Columbia, Canada and we were super lucky to have Brooke from Dance Play in our school today working with our students. If you are unaware of Dance Play, go out and check it out right now.
If you google Dance Play but replace the A in play with the number three you will find out all about Dance Play. Now Dance Play is a fantastic program that combines elements of dance with elements of play rather than coming in and teaching the students choreography and then having a performance dance at the end of the unit. This program really has been, today was my first experience of it but it was fantastic to see the way that they used dance and a really playful way through storytelling, through games, through different fundamental movement experiences really working on developing students' physical literacy and just basically having a heap of fun. It was really playful and fun experience for the students and particularly for a lot of the boys who maybe don't enjoy dance.
It was really great to see them just really engaged in moving their body in a variety of different ways creatively through this dance play program. So a super super exciting first day. I spent the entire day dancing with the students which if you've read any of my previous blog posts from a couple years ago about teaching dance to students, I think that's one of the key things that we want our students to be risk takers and to engage in dance experiences and I think as teachers we need to do that as well. I think there's nothing more powerful for our students who maybe don't enjoy dance or feel a little bit embarrassed.
If they see their teacher dancing then that is going to help them feel comfortable dancing as well. Today I did that with a student they dance all day and I can see the looks on a few students faces as they saw me dancing and being silly and having fun and encouraging them to feel okay doing that as well. One of the big things that Brooke talked about today with the students in the classes was feeling weird. You know like you're going to feel weird and it's okay to be weird and actually some of the greatest ideas that have come out of the world have come out of people that in their time felt weird so I like the idea of the creation of something that's something that's like the light bulb when somebody said you know I'm going to turn on a switch and light's going to happen like the initial thought would be well that's a really weird idea and now we have light bulbs or you know the idea of let's wrap a tin can around people and fly them across the world.
That was a weird idea and now we have planes so you know the idea that it's okay to be weird and we need to celebrate being weird I think was a really really good element to it so it's not only students exploring dance and movement but it's about them developing their confidence as well and developing that self-esteem and the idea of you know we're all awesome in our own in our own way. Another element that I really loved about it was that a lot of dance is taught through the idea of what copy me and do as I do but this dance play is taught through the lens of expressing in your own style and if it's in your own style you can't get it wrong so if I'm dancing in my own style that's unique to me and however I want to create it's unique to my experience I can't get that wrong so there's no sort of feeling inadequate because you're not able to copy a certain move you know you're you're creating that movement and doing that move in your own way so you're really really fantastic first day and I'm super excited because we have dance play at our school all of this week we have them in residence at our school for the entire week so I'm super excited to see how that dance play experience involves for our students over the course of the rest of this week. So as I said we're going to be having dance play for the rest of this week and this being the first week of our dance units we'll be using this as a launching point for the rest of our dance units or creative movement movement music movement composition over the next few weeks so this really I think is going to provide a really good launching off point invitation for the students to feel really confident and feel really like open-minded and excited about the opportunities that they're going to experience over the next couple of weeks through dance and creative movement. I'll be speaking I guess a little bit more about the plans that we have for that later this week in the coming weeks as we move through those dance that dance unit so that was today I saw or had grade five this morning we had some great fours and grades threes and grades two so all of the grade levels that I teach today got to experience dance and each of the classes will get three sessions with the dance play teachers this week so as I said super excited to see where the rest of the week goes.
In other phys ed news the PE awards um the phys ed awards are currently in the voting stage so it was nominated stage last week and you can find out more about that by going to the physical educator.com and you'll be able to see the different award nominees for the different phys ed awards so I highly recommend that you go and check that out and vote for the people that you think are the most deserving winners of those phys ed awards like I said I was very lucky to be a phys ed award in me back in 2014 and 2014 I think I was lucky to win one of the phys ed awards back there so it was a very humbling experience. I have voted this year in in the awards so I'm super excited to see who takes out those awards but also just excited to be able to recognize people who are doing fantastic work in the phys ed field to drive this profession forward. In other phys ed news and other news at Madaridge and phys ed I spoke last week about applying for the quality physical education awards through PHE Canada and I'm very very pleased to announce that we were recognized with a one-star quality physical education award so we will be proudly presenting the banner and hanging in our gym we will receive a letter from the Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and basically just celebrating the fact that we are offering a quality physical education experience to our students at the school so it's a really great advocacy piece for us as a department for us as a school to be able to open up conversations with our school community to be able to talk to physical education experience that we're offering students at the school. Now we've been awarded that one-star award there are it does go up to four-star so that's something that we'll be trying to work towards over the next couple of years is to try and build up to a two-star three-star four-star program and I have contacted PHE Canada for some feedback about ways that we can work towards that and improve from a one-star to a two-star three-star four-star and reasons why we were at once they were at those higher start so I'm looking forward to receiving feedback and then hopefully using that to guide some of our department goal setting over the coming years to help us to really improve the program and to develop it even further so a big congratulations to all of the members of the physical education department at Madaridge and admin for supporting us in our aims to deliver really quality physical education experiences to our students.
So for today that is about all for the daily phys ed podcast things again for joining us for another week of the daily phys ed I'm looking forward to continuing to share what is happening with our dance play residency this week and then further into our dance units as the rest of the coming weeks move on so until tomorrow my name is Nathan Horn from iFizzed.com this is the daily phys ed podcast until tomorrow stay happy stay healthy and stay awesome.