New hoop storage!

Today is Monday and I was dragging... but I was greeted in my office with all of the hoops up on the wall. I am pumped to have the hoops out of the way, since we don't have actually basketball hoops in our gym and I can not leave these out in the gym during lunch or after school. They would become targets for food and/or be taken off of the wall. I can't express the feeling of relief having them up. (refer to the picture)

After getting settled in the office, I found out my coworker would be absent so todays plans would need to be altered a little with having 50 students in the gym and only myself. I do all the teaching and my coworker handles more of the behavior management. So having a sub makes for a hiccup in the plans. I decided to stick with our lessons from last week, so our students would know what to expect. For 4th and 3rd grade, we had a normal warm-up, played fitness tag, some red light-green light basketball and ended with fish bowl tag.

For Kindergarten, I decided to switch it up a little... we had a short warm-up, then played a game of color tag for each class (which is another new thing for this year for all grades - I decided to separate class and class instead of boys and girls. I was a little hesitant whether the kids would respond well to it since for many of my students coming from East Africa, there is a much higher gender separation at home and in their communities. Well, the kids are responding very well and based on my observations, there are fewer behavior problems and there is a stronger sense of community within their classrooms.) After color tag, we played red light, green light basketball - once I was about to hand out the balls to use the whole gym, one of the students went to the bathroom in their pants - this caused a hiccup but I stayed calm and looked not surprised. Just told him to go to the bathroom, I kept speaking until the class noise came down, then told the kids we would only be using half of the gym. They did a good job staying on one half until the janitor was able to come clean up the mess on the floor. At that point, we used the whole gym. RLGL lasted about 10 minutes. We held an elimination round and found a winner.

We then played Mr Fox Mr. Fox with basketballs. The students start by asking Mr. Fox a question, "Mr. Fox, Mr. Fox, what time is it?" I am Mr Fox and I am standing on one end of the gym. I say a time ie. "5 o'clock" the students then walk and dribble 5 times. If they take too many steps, lose control over their ball or dribble too many times, they are out. (when they are out they bring their ball to me and I put it on the rack, then they sit down.) If I say, Midnight, the students have to turn around and hurry back to the starting line before myself or another fox knocks their ball out of bounds. If a student loses control of their ball, they must regain control before the starting line or they are out. If I say, Lunchtime, the students get to shoot into the hoops, when I say "back to the pen," they must hurry back similar to when I say Midnight. This game goes on until there are only 1-3 students remaining.

The morning went well, so I will plan to do the same for the afternoon. One bonus with my coworker being absent is I get a quiet office to myself!! :)