Fair Play

Hello,

This month’s topic of fair play couldn’t have come at a better time for myself.  I was sitting down during my prep just waiting for science to start and I decided to watch Brad’s video on fair play.  As soon as I saw this video I knew I had to show it to the students.  Holy Rosary Community School is one of smallest schools in our school division and our extra-curricular teams are based on a high percentage of our student body coming out and making those teams.  As further we got into the playoffs the more my students started to argue and fighting amongst themselves.  What was happening was that they were feeling pressure as a team that they haven’t felt before.  This was also affecting their personal relationships in the classroom.  I was seeing behaviours from students I never seen before. 

            I introduced this lesson to the grade 7/8’s by playing the quote from the movie “Rocky” on how winning is done.   We talked about how sometimes in life we might fall short of our goals but it doesn’t mean we give but keep working on it.  Once we saw the video we had an amazing open dialogue as a class on what was going on and how we were feeling as a class.  Although this was extra-curricular based we still were able to apply it with what was going on in the classroom.  We talked about his medals and how it was his team that won the medals and not just him.  We discussed if a team looses or win it is a team effort and not the result of one individual.  We also talked about his bronze medal and how they were favored to win gold and that his team fell short of their goal, which meant they just had to work harder next time. I also delivered this lesson to grades 1-6 although I didn’t introduce the other classes with the Rocky quote.  

            We than discussed what fair play looks like.  This is where we created the monthly assignment.  I got each student to draw an illustration of what fair play looks like, had a lot of great ideas I would like to share down below.