We are 26 children in 3rd class in Scoil Áine Naofa. Before we started the Grow Voice project, P.E. was different because we didn’t really think about what people thought of P.E.. We just thought it was a sports lesson where we did not have much say in what was going on. In our class, we like to play football, gymnastics, G.A.A., rounders, dancing, athletics and swimming.

The student voice strategies we tried were choice and learning to direct play. For our choice strategy, two people are chosen to do a warmup and a cool down in every P.E. lesson with the whole class. Those chosen people had to write down their ideas for their warm up/cool down. They had five minutes to do this with the class. The people who had a chance to carry out these warmups and cool downs really enjoyed
doing them but they said that they found it hard to get everybody to listen and do the activities. The people participating in the warmups and cool downs said that it was fun and nice to listen to someone else other than the teacher.

For the learning to direct play strategy, we got to choose what games and equipment we used to improve our skills that we were learning. It is fun to try out different things in P.E. that you might not have much experience with. Sometimes people aren’t interested in that particular topic and don’t want to participate in the free play properly.

Next year, we would like to do this in P.E. because now we get to talk about what we do in P.E. and make sure that we enjoy the activities. We found it hard to agree on certain things which made this a little bit difficult but we now know how to deal with it. We always liked P.E. but now we enjoy it more because we feel that we know more about our P.E., it is more organised and it’s quicker to sort things out by
communicating.