Creative Movement in Physical Education

I have now been teaching Creative Movement at Chadwick in the last week. This is a new unit that I am trying out. 6 weeks of creative movement with gymnastics and martial arts as the core activities. I have decided to start with gymnastics as I feel I can establish some key movements and concepts with the students first.

My plan is to have the same concepts running through the whole unit. I have decided to use Creativity as the key concept (not really allocated to PHE, but I am doing it anyway) and Refinement and Perspectives as the related concepts. Creativity is key as the students will be creating a sequence in gymnastics and a kata/poomsae in martial arts. They will be refining these as they go along and will be listening to others perspectives in their groups.

Each class had an opportunity at the beginning of the unit to establish the links of these concepts to the unit by understanding how they would fit in. The students split into twos or threes and discussed the concepts by drawing mind maps.

I would like it if the students thought of ways to include gymnastics in the martial arts kata/poomsae somehow. I once watched a film call 'Gymkata' where a gymnast combined gymnastics and karate to form a new martial art. I am not sure if this form of martial art took off but I do know that many martial artist in the modern era try to combine skills from various practices.

In my Taekwondo school in Switzerland, we would add self-defence from other forms, yoga and pilates at the end of the class, and often bring in aspects of karate as I had practiced that martial art (Seki Juku) for many years. I would like to see how creative my students during this unit with that outlook.

It is going to be interesting and creative!