“AJB have worked closely with Crowle First School for a number of years now – they are hard-working and always offer us exactly what we have asked for. Their service is excellent, and Andy is so approachable. They offer us small group interventions (fine and gross motor support), have supported our play leaders, supported PE planning and coached our staff across all areas of PE. They are friendly and polite, and our children love working with them. I cannot recommend them highly enough!”
Martina Abbott, Head Teacher at Crowle First School
Your teachers are highly skilled experts in the classroom, AJB Sports in Education are highly skilled in delivering Physical Education – lets work together to embed physical activity across your school.
With our Physical Education CPD program we work with your teaching staff to help up skill teachers in delivering Physical Education across the school. Your school and teachers get professional development, in session mentoring and resources to help them teach PE and sport more effectively to all pupils.
Our passion and philosophy is in line with AFPE in that we want to “promote and maintain high standards at all levels of physical education, school sport and physical activity that will impact on pupils’ physical health and emotional well-being”
AJB Sports in Education is proud to be working in a great number of schools across Worcestershire county and values the strong relationships between ourselves, the schools, the staff, and most importantly, the pupils. These ties have been fostered and grown over many years through delivering high quality PE lessons to pupils.
How do we run CPD?
Our Continual Professional Development program aims to offer on going support and advice to help empower teachers to deliver high quality physical education across their schools. We model our CPD with the PE Premium indicator: Increase confidence, knowledge and skills of all staff in teaching PE and sport, for example by providing staff with professional development, mentoring, training and resources to help them teach PE and sport more effectively to all pupils, and embed physical activity across your school
Lesson Planning Help
AJB will work with teachers to not only help empower them to deliver physical education sessions across KS1 and KS2 but also to help confidently plan progressive lessons. Through providing our own lesson plans and working with existing schemes of work used by schools, we help to walk through and breakdown the different lesson layouts that can be used: for example Step up, whole-part-whole and carousel.
We offer advice and experience on how to breakdown the PE lesson away from sport specific to basic fundamentals to cover the KS1 and KS2 National Curriculum targets in a fun and safe way. A simple breakdown of lessons could be below:
As part of the lesson plan support we will offer advice on how to use the STEP process to have multiple plans and ways to edit your lessons for different ability levels, success levels and space / equipment available to you. AJB will provide its lesson planning to the schools to be used in the future for all or any teachers that wish to use them. We will also use editable lesson plans that can be used across multiple age groups and subjects.
In lesson support
AJB will work with and mentor teachers during their CPD time with their children by helping to run the lessons, provide feedback and offer insight into why we are delivering and how. Our objective over the course of the half term is to provide enough lessons and support that by the end the teaching staff are confident to run lessons with AJB staff in support. We would do this with a breakdown of the weeks between AJB delivering model sessions for the teaching staff who are observing to AJB staff supporting and the teaching staff leading. An example of a 6 week term may look like this:
Lesson 1: AJB deliver whole lesson – teaching staff observe
Lesson 2: AJB deliver whole lesson – teaching staff observe
Lesson 3: Teaching staff deliver warm up – AJB Support then deliver progression and end games
Lesson 4: Teaching staff deliver warm up and progress – AJB support and deliver end games
Lesson 5: Teaching staff deliver whole lesson – AJB support
Lesson 6: Teaching staff deliver whole lesson – AJB support
During these lesson plans AJB staff will explain each section of the lesson plan: Learning objectives, Warm up, progression and Mini games so that teaching staff gain an insight into why the lesson has been designed like this and what our objectives are.
Teacher confidence and subject knowledge
Our CPD can be used by school to target areas the teaching staff feel they needed further support on and help increase knowledge of a specific sport or subject. The ultimate goal is to up skill and empower teachers to increase their subject knowledge across the National Curriculum and deliver with confidence.
We aim to finish CPD with schools and teachers with those teachers feeling more confident in both planning and delivering PE lessons, as well as increasing their subject knowledge along the way. This is done with a combination of the lesson planning help, the in lesson support and the Support manager.
Diving deeper into our lesson plan support and in lesson support AJB will provide and walk through editable session plans that can cover multiple sports and National curriculum targets. We have found over the years that having adaptable and editable lesson plans allow teaching staff to increase their knowledge of how to plan different sports lessons using the same games and lesson format they have used previously. These editable lesson plans can then be used by teaching staff to plan future lessons. For example a generic ‘dribbling and traveling with a ball’ lesson plan can adapted to Football, Basketball and Hockey and even Rugby.
Support manager
AJB staff will be available to answer any questions that schools may have in the future once the CPD has ended (and during). This can be anywhere from answering questions regarding lessons plans, subjects or topics. Or simply being there for advice or feedback. This can be over email or phone calls.
Making PE sustainable:
Upon conclusion of your CPD with AJB Sports in Education, our target is that your staff will be more confident to be able to:
• Be able to confidently plan Physical Education lessons for a variety of subjects
• Deliver high-quality PE lessons on their own across varying topics and curriculums in a fun and safe way.
• Have an increased knowledge of the PE curriculum targets and how to use lesson planning to deliver this.
• Using the STEP process be able to differentiate lessons to enable pupils to include all children of all ability levels
• Have a set of Physical Education resources to use in future led how sessions.
AJB Sports in Education provide high quality, experienced specialists to run sessions for every school year (Reception – Year 6) during Term Time. We pride ourselves in delivering high quality, fun, creative and structured lessons covering the KS1 and KS2 National Curriculums. We work with your staff to target areas that either staff members wish to develop in or the school wishes to target specific sports or national curriculum topics for their children
We believe CPD should be very hands on with the teachers where we work together to run the sessions across the half term / term. It is not just the AJB staff that deliver the sessions, we like to incrementally shift the teaching from ourselves to the teacher so that at the end of the half term it is your staff member that is running the sessions with our guidance.
We provide sessions plans for all lessons that we co deliver. Each session plan will show the different stages of the lessons and also using the STEP process, we highlight the changes we would make in the case of groups and topics that need to be differentiated.
Guided Discovery Teaching Style for Creative PE Lessons
There are many ways to teach and coach both in and out of the classroom with a variety of different styles being used in each situation; Autocratic, Democratic, Q and A, Observation and Feedback are just a few examples. However, at AJB Sports in Education the style that we primarily adopt within our lessons is one of Guided Discovery.
This approach allows our staff members to create fun, interactive and challenging sessions that allow the children to problem solve their way to answers. Instead of giving students the answers, such as “Stop, stand still, you should have done it this way”, guided discovery is an approach that allows children to begin working out problems on their own but under the guidance of our staff. We encourage children to ‘Try – Make a mistake – Learn from the mistake – Try again’.
Benefits of Guided Discovery:
- – Allows children to discover the best way for them to complete a certain task or to develop a new skill.
- – Allows the students to experiment with different alternatives in order to achieve the desired goal.
- – It increases their understanding of why certain options are more advantageous and effective than others.
- – It is an ideal way for students to discover possible strategies that can be used within specific games or sports.
The idea behind guided discovery is to ensure children understand not only the How, What and When but importantly the Why! Therefore when competing individually or away from a coach, they will have the necessary skills to be able to workout problems for themselves instead of relying on adults to tell them what to do.
Reception PE
We love working with Reception PE – we see it as a blank canvas ready to learn!
At AJB Sports in Education we believe our main role at Reception PE level is to create a fun, safe environment for children to enjoy and learn through entertaining and exciting games. We understand that not every child will like PE and enjoy playing sport so it is incredibly important to ensure all lessons are different and aimed at all levels of ability and interest. We want all children to leave our lessons having had a great time, regardless of ability.
At this young age, PE can teach so much more than just how to play a sport or what the basic rules are. We try to ensure our lessons and games are developing not just the physical skills but their mental and social skills as well. We place children in fun and challenging situations where teamwork is needed, problem solving is required, communication and sharing are the answers and even some times maths will be necessary! PE can be an effective tool that can be utilised in many areas of a child’s development, for example the fine motor skills used for handwriting can be helped with Hand eye Coordination games and schemes of work.
The children will learn so much that can be used both inside and outside of PE lessons for their future development as they play fun games like Sharks and Surfers, Cheeky Monkeys and Pirates!
Please take look at a great testimonial from Reception Teacher Mrs Palfreyman from St Georges Catholic Primary School in Worcester to see how our philosophy and methods are being used to benefit children in the area.
Key Stage 1
We are able to provide lessons that cover everything from the National Curriculum KS1; Balance, Coordination, Throwing, Catching etc. We believe that, again, our focus should be on learning through fun. Children at this age are beginning to develop their Fundamental Movement Skills that they will take into the specific sports played in future.
Again we love to focus on developing all areas: Physical, Mental and Social skills within each session and scheme of work. We highly value challenging the children and putting them into small groups to talk, problem solve and evaluate performances together in order to stretch them and develop those core problems solving skills.
The Psychological and Social sides often get forgotten during PE lessons, yet the ability to communicate, problem solve, work as a team and learn to be a leader are corner stones of adult life – so why not teach and encourage this through sport?
This is exactly what we try to do in all of our lessons – give some power and responsibility to the children. What we find is that instead of hearing “I cant do that” or “It’s too difficult”, we often hear “I’ve got an idea”, or “we could try this”.
Placing children in fun game situations where they have to problem solve, either individually or together in teams, encourages creativity and teamwork. Sport is regularly organised chaos with moving parts and changing situations at all times, so it is never a case of ‘in this situation you must do this’. Often success is achieved through understanding the problems faced, and making the right choices. We try to encourage children to see option A, B, C, D and even E and then guide them to make the choice for themselves for how to find a solution.
The thought process of children leads to some wonderful and imaginative ideas when given the chance to express themselves, and our part as educators comes in encouraging their creativity regardless of success, and teaching them that losing is just the first step of learning.
Mrs Lindsay from Crowle First School sent us some lovely comments about the PE AJB Sports in Education deliver at her school. We’d love you to have a look.
Key Stage 2
At Key Stage 2 our focus gears more towards both the development of their Fundamental Movement Skills and also their Sports Specific Skills. We focus on KS2 Sports National Curriculum topics including Specific sports like Football, Rugby and Hockey etc plus developing Strength, Technique and playing Invasion Games while learning the Principles of Attacking and Defending.
Even at Key Stage 2, we continue to promote an element of fun during lessons, as this is still incredibly important to how the children react and feel about sport and PE. However, our focus leans towards introducing Sports Specific skills and the introduction of tactics and sports specific teamwork. Children are shown that many skills are transferable across sports and how to use these skills to their benefit. At this age winning becomes more important to children, but we also encourage an ethos that sees losing an opportunity to learn and that it is just as valuable overall. Our Guided Discovery style allows children to learn to develop their own techniques within sports and be creative in both technique and decision making within games.
For those interested in competitive sports, we design sessions to push them to the next level and to continue building upon their innate love of sport and high levels of ability. Whilst at the same time we work hard to light a fire under those children who have never held that same emotional connection to sports, and make sure they leave our lessons with a new found passion for the subject and may look to continue to play outside of school.
In addition, AJB Sports in Education can tailor our services to the individual needs of your school and will work diligently with teachers and schools to ensure that children get the very highest level of coaching that they deserve and require throughout their growth. We are more than happy to work closely with the school’s current staff in order to share our experience and knowledge in these areas to provide teachers with valuable ideas, modes of working and session plans that can then be replicated in future.
