My placement is at Weetwood Primary School in Headingley. The school is located off Otley Road, across the road from Leeds Beckett University Headingley campus. This is a very nice area so the children are mostly well behaved and competent at sports, as well as the parents being nice and getting on well with the teachers. The fact that the parents and teachers have such a good relationship means the parents can be relied upon to get the children to events outside of school. This relates to both the commitment and communication elements of the five C’s (Harwood, 2015).
Weetwood is a one form entry school with years reception to year 6. The children came up with five school rules; always be kind, always be polite, always be sensible, always work hard and always walk in school. The school aims to provide an exciting and creative curriculum which helps every child reach their full potential and develop their own talents. They believe that their children should not only be academically ready for their next stage in learning but should be able to express themselves – be it in drama, music, the arts and sport.
The school has fantastic provisions for sport, with a dedicated P.E teacher, double sports hall and a well stocked P.E cupboard. The P.E teacher – Mrs. Sarah Lowe – works across the whole school, teaching P.E to all classes as well as a range of extra curricular sports clubs. The sports equipment includes all types of balls, rackets and bats for different invasion, net and wall and striking and fielding games. They also have netball posts and football goals on the yard outside and a climbing frame, agility tables and spring boards inside for gymnastics.
For PE lessons during the school day the entire hall and the outside space is available to the teacher, whilst after school clubs only have half the hall available as well as the outside space. The space available determines the activity that can be delivered, for example; bench ball and dodgeball are very difficult to deliver if you only have half the hall for a whole class. Whereas if you have the whole hall or all of the outside space, you can run two games and have everyone playing at once. Having the correct environment for an activity will lead to constructive alignment (Biggs, 2003) which will improve the learning experience for the participants.
References:
Biggs, J. (2003) ‘Aligning teaching and assessing to course objectives’, Teaching and learning in higher education: New trends and innovations, 2(April), pp.13-17.
Harwood, C. G., Anderson, R. and Barker, J. B. (2015) ‘Psychosocial Development in Youth Soccer Players: Assessing the Effectiveness of the 5Cs Intervention Program’, Sport Psychologist, 29(4), p. 319. Available at: http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edb&AN=111875563&site=eds-live&scope=site (Accessed: 10 December 2019).
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