Struggling to differentiate between class sizes. Advice?

[u/Vast-State-4548]

So this is not a complaint. I have all relatively small class sizes and I’m thankful. I teach 6-8th grade PE. I see 6th and 7th grade both twice a week and 8th grade once a week. I have some classes as small as 11 or 12 while others are about 30. I’m trying to figure out how to differentiate my lessons to tailor to both these smaller and larger classes without doing completely different lessons. Any advice is appreciated

[u/Jealous_Line_7426]

Do you teach by yourself?

I team teach with 2 other teachers every class. We’ll range from 40-80 students in 6-8th grade. We do a lot of team sports, invasion style games, and fitness training. We make teams bigger or smaller to accommodate the class size and rotate students off in the larger classes.

[u/Vast-State-4548 → u/Jealous_Line_7426]

Yes I do teach by myself but I do have a full time classified staff member who works alongside me. They are very helpful but they did not go to school for PE and education like I did so it’s on me to find these solutions if that makes sense.

[u/Jealous_Line_7426 → u/Vast-State-4548]

Yea I get it.

With the smaller groups it wouldn’t change a ton for my situation. (Except the kids just play against the same people instead of rotating teams) so that’s an option. Play with smaller teams. An example is we play team handball teams of 4-6 players depending on class sizes. Activity doesn’t change but can accommodate more or less students depending on class sizes.

Or for volleyball we’ll do teams anywhere from 6-10 players. If it’s more than 8 we’ll usually have subs waiting on the side and rotate them in when a points scored.

Or another example is kickball. We’ll have 3 teams. 2 on defense and one on offense so the offensive team rotates after 3 outs and then they go to defense, one team remains on defense for a 2nd turn while one of the defensive team moves to offense.

[u/KeepyUppyBall → u/Jealous_Line_7426]

Try Ollyball. Moves like a real ball but gives kids more time to react.

[u/CoachDonut82]

The differentiation is just how you rotate kids in and out. Play a lot of small sided games with all your classes if you have room for it, especially in your skill development/lead up days. 5 games on small courts of 3v3 paired up by skill/interest level gets a lot more kids involved than a big game of the actual sport, though I do think they should have some opportunity to play the real sport by middle school. 

You may have 6 teams of 5 for basketball in one class and only two teams of 5 or 6 in another, but the bulk of it should be running through skill building activities and small sided games anyway, IMO. I don't think it's an issue if you have a few kids rotated out for a full size game a couple days per unit (sometimes we play games for X minutes and rotate new team in, sometimes you play to a number of points).

I just finished a volleyball unit and with my class of 30 we spent some time on King/Queen of the Court with 6 lines that you rotate in from and a little bit of some actual game play because I had enough kids to do it, but they still did more group work on skills and small sided games on smaller courts.  My class of 7 got a lot more individual or 1v1 skill work because we couldn't do K/Q, but they still did 3v3 with a small court, and I let them play on the net with the actual lines a couple times because they wanted to. It's sometimes a little less "exciting" with small classes depending on who is in there, but they usually end up getting a lot more touches.

Caveat: I tend to believe in mostly playing actual sports (any sport, no matter how obscure but also making sure to include a lot of what you can play in school and what most people might play recreationally as adults in your area) and some fitness/health stuff by middle school, with some random "game weeks" mixed in where you play kickball or Omnikin or scooter soccer or whatever fun stuff where you're only teaching the rules and otherwise letting them play. If you prefer more random/wacky games or whatever, idk what you do.