Fair Play Spotted

In any sport, classroom or group, having a good sense of what fair play is makes everything that group does much more enjoyable for all involved.  In Kieran Block's video lesson to us this month, he highlighted the reasons why he thought fair play was important - focusing especially on the idea of honesty.  He challenged our classes to come up with examples every day of fair play that we saw around us.

What better way to learn about Fair Play than to use the International Fair Play website?  The resources there break fair play up into all kinds of parts.  I created a PowToon to show the students what the parts were.

After watching the Powtoon, I placed papers around the classroom with each of the parts written on the top.  The students went around and wrote things they could do to show each.  I was thrilled to see many examples of all topics at the end of class.

In Health class, I was able to incorporate this month's unit into my values unit when we talked about sportsmanship.  I always talk about examples and non examples of sportsmanship when introducing this topic.  There are, unfortunately, many examples of poor sportsmanship.  After looking a a few of these, I show them my favourite story of all time, a story that brings a tear to my eye every time I watch it.  It is about a softball player who sacrificed a win for her team to do the right thing for another team's player.  Do a Google search for sportsmanship and softball.  It's the first thing that pops up.  We discussed the difference between how hearing and watching the stories made them feel.  My final question of that lesson.....how do your fair play actions make others feel when they watch you?  That tends to be an eye-opener.

Following that lesson, I have the students create a billboard advertisement for fair play.  I gave the students a number of links and a template for the billboard.  They had to read the articles, choose one to summarize and decide what part of fair play the story represented.  From there, they created their billboards on Google Slides.  These have been shared with the school.  Many teachers have been using them on their morning message.

Now, I have not forgotten Kieran's challenge.  I created a Fair Play Spotted heading on our classroom door.  Students added sticky notes of examples that they saw of fair play every day.  I always knew when something awesome happened at house leagues or in a school soccer game because there was a line up at my door with students writing away.  Check out how our door grew this month.  Thanks, Kieran for helping us get our month of Fair Play started out right.

Saskatchewan Curricular Objectives

Health 

USC 6.4

ELA

CC 6.1, 6.4

CR 6.2, 6.4