Perform to the criteria

I have just completed a gymnastics unit with my year 5 students, and it was an interesting unit to say the least. I quickly realised that these students could not construct a performance, thus getting them to understand that a performance is not a case of getting through the movements as quick as you can, but that there is an aesthetic aspect involved.

Relating and linking gymnastics to aesthetic performance sports, which they can see in the olympics, students created a performance criteria. I collated them and made a generic one for all my year 5 classes. If we had time, we would have explored their own criteria and then created a generic one together, but time was not on our side. This is something we may do next year.

For our lesson, students performed to the whole class, who were grouped in 5-6 groups for their own performance. They simply ticked (✓) or cross (x) on what they observed in the performance. They then totalled up the score, which we collated later at the end of the class. I did think of doing a star rating or allowing students to leave a score out of 10 (for each criterion), but my students were not quite ready for that. However, I would use this idea with my older students, thus providing more effective feedback.

Once all the students performed, I collated each team's scores on the white board, so students could compare the scores that were given for their own performance. We followed this with an in depth discussion about how opinions differ from one to the other and that you can choose if you agree/disagree with an opinion. On the other hand, if there is some consistency in scores/opinion, then maybe you should consider it.

We proved this point by asking for some feedback of the groups that assessed a particular group with a '9' and asked what was missing to make it a perfect score. Each group gave them a different area to improve.

Obviously, this idea can be transferred to other areas, so go and give it a try. Let me know how you get on.

Performance criteria resource: https://tinyurl.com/jzx4x6w

#Primary #Gymnastics