Hi everyone, we are 6th Class Room 15 from Our Lady’s Grove Primary School in Goatstown, Dublin. There are 25 children in our class and we have both boys and girls in our class.

Typical PE in our school consists of different strands of PE being completed during different terms or half terms. The sports we like to play are: football, Gaelic football, hurling/camogie, hockey, basketball and gymnastics. Each of the classes in our school also complete a 7 week term of swimming in our local swimming pool. The Parents Association and teachers in our school also offer a range of after school sports activities which include: gymnastics, athletics, tennis, basketball, football, hockey, hurling/camogie and Gaelic football, multi-sports activities and dance.

In our PE lessons, we used many strategies but focused mainly on the strategy of ‘Using Choice to Find Voice’ and ‘Learning to Direct Play’.

In our class, we started to use the strategy ‘Using Choice to Find Voice’ both in our warm-up choice and in the main body of our lesson.

One example we had was when we were given the option to partake in a competitive or noncompetitive version of the game, ‘keeping a rally’ in tennis. This gave us the choice to compete against our friends or to try and keep up a rally to improve.

Another example of this strategy was when we were given two options for our warm-up activity. These were ‘Bring Sally Up’ and ‘Cardio Time’. We were given the opportunity to vote on these two activities, using magnetic counters with our class numbers on them. Picture below. We enjoyed doing this as it was our choice instead of the teachers choice.

We also used the strategy of ‘Learning to Direct Play’ in our PE lessons. In football, someone in our group decided to make the change of ‘three touch’ in our game. Everyone voted on this change by giving a thumbs up or thumbs down and we went with the majority vote. This involved allowing each player to touch the ball three times before they had to pass the ball.

Another change to the football game involved passing to each member of the team before shooting at the goal. This was decided on by two members of a team and we tried this out in our group games. We thought that this strategy worked well because everyone got a touch of the ball.

We think it would be nice for other teachers in the school to try this resource as we felt very included in the PE lessons and we felt that we had a choice in the activities and how we played the different games. We would also like to try another another strategy or two in the future during our PE lessons. We think that the strategies are explained clearly and it is easy to use them across all the strands of the PE curriculum.

• 6th Class Room 15