This should be Week 3 of my placement at Raploch Primary School however, the school was closed for the October holidays. Therefore, I have decided to write about another session that I assisted during week 2. This session was directed towards primary 1-2 children were an external football coach named Hamish came into the school to lead a football session. My role during this session was to support Hamish by setting up drills while managing children’s behavior.

Firstly, we started off with a warm-up playing disco tig. Once the children were warmed up, we then decided to go into a shooting drill which all of the children seemed to love! Myself and Hamish split the children into two teams e.g. a red team and a blue team. Both teams stood in a straight line behind their cone facing the goals. The kids were expected to run out to a cone that was placed to their right or left – touch it with their hand and run straight back to their starting cone. Once they got back to the starting cone, both groups were expected to race for the ball which was situated in the middle of the court and try to score into one of the two bottom corners. My first thought was this is going to be challenging as I felt that the kids would lose concentration however, I was wrong!! It ran pretty smoothly.

After we added some additional parts to the shooting drill, we progressed into a game that was very entertaining. Due to the children being so young they were either all running for the ball at the one time or they couldn’t work out which way to shoot. Hamish decided to stop the game at one point and explained why we need to spread out as well as informing each team which way they were supposed to be shooting, as some of the participants were trying to shoot into their own goal. Once he explained to the kids which way they were supposed to be shooting the game flowed a lot better.

Overall, assisting a session with younger participants has shown how challenging it can be to not only manage children’s behavior but plan sessions that are within their capabilities. This session has shown me that all kids learn differently, some have better concentration spans than others and that all children are at different levels in terms of ability.