Physical Education (PE) and CLIL

My heart's still beating fast and I'm sweating like a pig. Strange, that, isn't it? Sweating like a pig? But, pigs don't sweat, do they? Well, maybe it's more to do with our BO when we sweat a lot, since pigs supposedly smell bad, rather than the sweating itself. There are other animal idioms, such as 'eating like a horse' and 'drinking like a fish', which also do make you wonder if they make much sense.

Anyway, I digress. Why is my heart beating fast and why am I sweating like a pig, you're probably asking. Is it that I've just struck the Euromillions, or have I been hit by the 'thunderbolt', as in when Michael Corleone met Apollonia?

From a cLiL to cLiMB

Well, not quite so. I've just given my first PE lesson as a CLIL subject, that's all.

PE is probably one of the best subjects to be taught in L2. As most teachers and students know, listening skill is primordial to fluency in a language. Babies spend their early years merely listening before they utter their first word, and on a personal level, I spent my first two years in Las Palmas hardly understanding what people were saying, but when my ears began to interpret the input correctly, my tongue started feeling grateful.

In PE, if the students don't understand what I say, I simply repeat the words with a physical demonstration. They follow. After repeating a few times, they will soon be able to do the exercise without the need for my demonstration. Obviously, we try to do this in the other subjects, too, but it isn't always possible or easy to achieve. Imagine demonstrating the conquest of the Barbarians of the Roman Empire, or the structure of cells, and you'll catch my drift. Doing it in PE comes naturally.

What's more, I started recalling words which have long been buried in the cobwebs of my mind... such as duck walk and piggyback!

And, not to mention it's a fun way of shedding the extra kilos!