Transforming Play PDF

Kids love to play games. But learning the tactics and skills so that they can more fully enjoy them and do well at them is not easy. And the traditional, highly structured, teacher-directed approach of teaching the tactics and skills separate from the games themselves makes the process quite boring for the kids—who, after all, just want to play the game.

Enter Transforming Play: Teaching Tactics and Game Sense. This book uses a games approach that not only works but that kids love. Kids learn the fundamentals of game play through playing the game itself, using its basic tactics, and then learning the skills involved as they attempt to execute the tactics.

Transforming Play: Teaching Tactics and Game Sense includes

• an introduction to using generic games to develop key skills and tactics;

• games that you can use to develop kids’ gross motor skills and tactical understanding, which can be transferred to and used in many popular sports;

• sport-specific sections with ideas for games you can use with children in learning school sports;

• questions and coaching points you can use at key moments in teaching tactics and strategies as the kids play the games; and

• support materials for authentic assessment that enhances rather than intrudes on the learning experience.

This book provides you with all you need to help your students learn tactics and game sense. You’ll learn the theory behind using generic games and play that will help your students begin to understand the key tactical principles and develop the gross motor skills—running, dodging, catching, throwing, and kicking—that they can use in many popular sports.

Transforming Play: Teaching Tactics and Game Sense also offers ideas you can use to help kids transfer the general tactics and gross motor skills they have learned to specific sports, including basketball, soccer, badminton, and netball.

Dennis G. Slade, MPhil, is a senior lecturer and coordinator of the BEd secondary physical education degree at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand. He has played national and international sport and is currently a member of the New Zealand men’s masters field hockey team. He has had a long career in teaching physical education and coaching sport and was the head coach of the New Zealand U16 boys’ field hockey academy. Dennis is the author of Senior School Physical Education: A Course Book for New Zealand Schools (two editions), Teaching Attack and Defence in Team Games: A TGfU Approach (5 reprints) and a CD-ROM Stick2hockey, a TGfU approach to teaching field hockey to novices. He has presented at two international TGfU conferences, was the keynote presenter for the West Zone Physical Education Conference in Singapore (2006) and has presented numerous workshops on TGfU and game sense approaches to game instruction in New Zealand. His research interests include youth and masters sport, the TGfU and game sense methodologies, and physical activity.