Volleyball and French

Today I saw a great lesson taught to grade fives on how to play volleyball. As the lesson unfolded from learning simple tasks to the more complex, I started to see parallels to learning French. 

Bumping = precise pronunciation

Setting the ball = speaking using the correct verb endings

Rally = mini dialogues 

Serving = starting a conversation 

Spiking = impressive vocabulary 

Any other parallels? 

Learning Goals that Don't Matter

In the Minds On introduction of your lesson, if you mention the Learning Goal for the lesson, you will give your students a sense of what is to be accomplished, to be sure. But what do you say? If it's something like "Today, we are going to learn about...." or "Our goal today is to talk about...." or "In this lesson, we are going to learn how to...", are you doing anything more than setting them up for fact-finding, amassing information, or covering an aspect of the curriculum? How then do you UNcover the curriculum to probe into questions relevant to the student's thinking and experience? You can have a great attention grabber to get your students to focus at the beginning, a series of colourful and interactive things to do and a crisp review session at the end of the lesson to cap it off, but why is any of this important? In order to gain any hope of getting your students to think more deeply and be genuinely curious about the lesson content for reasons that matter to them, try setting up the learning goal of your lesson so that it is threaded through with an open-ended question like "Why do you agree or disagree with...?" or "What personal experience have you had that is like....?" or "Design your solution to this problem". Two things may happen as a result: your lesson will be designed around a question or problem that builds, and secondly, you may hear fewer questions like "do you want us to...?" or "how many do we have to know?" Hopefully the lesson will shift from what they are supposed to know to get marks to finding out for themselves the answer to a question they care about.