Friday, June 23, 2006

a quick ps - to remind me for tomorrow what I was actually going to say today, but didn't

This afternoon at school the kids had PE and we were doing practice for sports day on Monday. And some of them were just hilarious. They were doing things like sack race, and skipping race, and some of them were just beyond belief. I spent quite a lot of the session skipping to try to teach one particular child to skip. I also discovered why it's best not to skip in bare feet (kept catching the rope in my toes), but why bare feet are better than flipflops (they fly off).

However, it did make me think about just how difficult skipping can be - There's group skipping, with a big rope, and he can do that if someone tells him when to run in.
But then there's skippig on your own. He is hopeless at skipping on the spot - doesn't know when to jump, and more often than not ends up on his backside on the floor.
But thirdly there's skipping and running at the same time, and that's what we were trying today. In the end I just had to get him to swing the rope over his head, and then not until it was on the ground in front of him did I tell him to step over the rope. Not sure if you can really count it as skipping - more stepping over a rope that you happen to be holding in front of you, but it was hard enough for him, and it gave him a sense of achievement to be able to actually do it. And hopefully he won't be embarassed when he does it on Monday.

Finally, no-one mention the word sausages ever again. But I'll explain that tomorrow. Maybe.

1 comment:

Pig wot flies said...

I'm not sure I ever got the hang of running while skipping. It always strikes me as asking for trouble. Running, while swinging ropes around, with lots of other people? Bound to end in tears.