Teaching Table Tennis Project

This project contains all the branches of CAS which are creativity, action and service. The creativity part of this project is where we plan and create training programs for us to stick to it. Action is when we actively play table tennis one on one with the kids. Service is where we teach something which is table tennis in this case, to a group of people. The project will be between 19 October 2016 and 20 March 2017. The timetable of our project is:

19 October 2016 – Starting our project and meeting with our assistant principle Rustu Sakalli, meeting with the third grader assistant principle Bulent Avci

02 November 2016 – Meeting a third grade homeroom teacher to have more knowledge about how to treat third grade students in case they don’t listen to us.

18 November 2016 – 20 March 2017 – Between these dates, we will do our lessons. We will go to play with the kids two times a week (during exam weeks we may not go twice a week, we will try our best to go play wtih the kids twice a week but it may not always happen)

20 March 2017 – We will organize a tournament just for fun to see how the kids progressed throughout our three months of work. There will be no eliminations in this tournament, everybody will play with each other and every kid who participated will get a surprise gift from us.

11th Grade assistant principle Rustu Sakalli has sent an email about a CAS project on 19 October 2016. It was a school day and he sent the email during lesson time so I’m lucky to be the first student to check my emails and go grab the project because he only needed two students. The project was about teaching table tennis to the 1st graders of our school. After reading the email I told my classmate Ferhat Ciftci to look at it too because we were both interested in playing table tennis. We were friends but we haven’t known each other really well so this project will be an opportunity for me to work with someone who is not close to me. After my friend read the email as well, we rushed to Mr. Sakalli’s office to start the project and have our first official meeting.

First of all he was shocked seeing two students immediately after sending the email. He questioned us about whether we want this project just to finish CAS or are we going to take this project seriously. Not blaming him, he had to do such a thing because when a project included primary school students he had to choose his students carefully because those students will not only represent Eyuboglu IB, they will also be brothers to those little students so he had to find the right candidates. After we made sure we were going to take this project very seriously, we talked about planning it.

We had no knowledge about how to treat primary school students so when we told our ideas to our assistant principle, we realised that we had lots of gaps to fill before starting to teach. We came to a conclusion, before starting the project we were going to talk to one homeroom teacher and the assistant principle of the first graders. We are planning to have our meetings with them to learn about how to treat first graders if they don’t listen to us, or go wild like almost every child do at that age.

We then planned how we were going to teach table tennis. We were thinking about starting with basic handling, how to use a table tennis racket and how to hit the ball properly. These stages will be hard because we have limited time to teach the kids because we can only go there on break times and our schedule is different. When our breaks start, their breaks are about to finish so when we only have 3-4 minutes in a break to teach, it is hard to teach the basics of table tennis because the engagement will be enormous, since they are first graders they will want to attend everything they see, knowing from first hand experience. Our assistant principle agreed to us having lack of time so he suggested to have a meeting with the first grade assistant principle later today, during our lunch break so we can discuss our timing with their assistant principle.

At this moment of our project I’m yet to achieve any CAS learning experience, maybe besides “Working Collaboratively With Others” since I’m working with someone who I am not very close with.

Since the break times of the first graders are different from ours, we took permission from our assistant principle to leave our fifth class, which was English B HL, five minutes early to avoid the lunch queue and go directly to the primary school building for our meeting with the first grader assistant principle. 

The assistant principle were thankful to see us volunteering for such a project however, after this meeting we sadly decided to do this project with the third graders because they were bigger and our schedules were the same so we will have a lot more time to play table tennis with them. We told the first grader assistant principle, everything we told to Mr. Sakalli and she loved it but still do to some circumstances we understood that it was impossible to do this project with the first graders. Some of these circumstances were:

·  Lack of time: we would only have 3 to 4 minutes every break time to play table tennis. This means that every break time maximum five students would be able to play and both them and we will probably going to be late for our next class.

·  Number of students: this issue is directly proportional with lack of time. Because there are 130 first graders and only one table to play tennis and only four mi notes to play, it would have been impossible to play with every kid which may lead them to start hating the game because they wait every break time to play it but they can’t.

·  Part permission: Sure most of the parents will love their child to play a sport but in case of an injury because we are responsible for the kids the parents can be harsh to us and our repertoire will be broken.

She said it would be better and easier for us if we do this project with the third graders. She thanked us for being generous and willing to look after her students but she also asked a favour. She asked us was it possible for us to come and play table tennis with the kids in rainy days (1st graders can not go outside in rainy days) because it was so hard to control some of the kids in rainy days. we happily accepted this offer and promised to go play with the first graders in rainy days. 

Our next stop was Bulent Avci, who was the assistant principle of the third graders. I have known Mr. Avci since I was a lycee prep because he was my little sister’s assistant principle for two years. Lucky for us he really liked the Project and even wanted to help us. We saw him in the playground of the primary school students and went there to talk with him.

We again told the same things we talked with the other assistant principles however, because Mr. Avci’s knowledge about his grade was a lot he gave us useful ideas. He told us that he tried to persuade his students to play table tennis but because nobody standed there with them for inspiration, they weren’t willing to play. Also the kids don’t have rackets nor balls and the school doesn’t provide one for them so again, they can’t play table tennis in their break times. What he strictly stepped on was that there will be lots of engagement to our Project. Not everyone, like first graders, would like to join at first but after they see each other play they will come too. He said that he had a method for excessive engagement, there is a black line next to the table and the kids get in line behind it. He said that third graders was mature enough to get in a line so we shouldn’t bother that very much which is a magnificent thing for us because now we would only focuse on teaching table tennis.

After talking to Mr. Avci, our project’s finalised steps were:

1- After our exams finish, we will announce our projects to the third graders by going into their classes. (18.11.2016 will be the day we will anounce our projects because we aren’t available until this date)

2- We will have an experimentation training with the kids to get to know them and see their levels on playing table tennis (18.11.2016)

3- After the November holiday finishes, that week, we will start our project.

4- First, we will play with everybody who is interested in playing table tennis. (This process will take a mont hor two)

5- After a couple of months, we will continue our project with the kids who are still determined to play and learn.

6- We will take those kids’ names and start appointment sessions. (For example we will play with kids A and B on Monday’s lunch break, C and D on Tuesday’s lunch break…)

7- This doesn’t mean, however, that we are not going to let other kids who are not in the appointment sessions to play. Of course we are going to play with them too but after we finish playing with the appointmented ones. Everybody will get to play.

8- We will have progress meetings with their teachers and parents about whether this project affected their behaviour or not. (Kids in third grade always tells the things they have done in school to their parents and teachers so if they say they are happy about how things are going with table tennis, then we are on the right track.)

We generated a teaching method. We are going to play with every single kid one by one and we are going to teach the basics by playing with them. For example while Ferhat is playing with kid A, I will be the one to Show kid A how to hold a racket and hit the ball. The kids will learn interactively and other kids who are watching their friends play can learn the basics by watching us teaching to the kid who plays at that moment. We will win ourselves lots of time by this method. This part of our project compasses the creativity part because we came up with a teaching method by ourselves.

We had one last person to talk in order to learn how to treat third graders and that was a homeroom teacher but we decided to talk with her next week because after our meeting with Mr. Avci, the lunch break was finished and we went to our classes.

02.11.2016

Me and my partner had a busy week so our meeting with a homeroom teacher was delayed a couple of days but it didn’t affect our project since we weren’t going to start until 18 November 2016. We found a teacher on duty on the third floor of the Eyuboglu Camlica building which is the building including primary school students and the third floor is the third graders’ floor. The teacher we found was a Turkish originated English teacher and she was the homeroom teach of 3-D. We told her our project and she adored it. She thought the project would be definitely helpful to chill out hyperactive students because they will have different chief attention then running and hitting each other.

She said some valuable things about how to treat a third grade student if they don’t listen you or act as they aren’t supposed to. She first claimed that the students were mature enough to obey to rules we set/ will set at the beginning of the project. The second thing she claimed was the kids were good at waiting their turns, (some of them are against this claim) they won’t rush for their turn to come. 

She taught us how to interact with the kids. She said that they weren’t babies so we should talk to them naturally or else they could get offended. She also said that if we ever shout to them, then the kid will lose his desire to play table tennis and won’t listen to us anymore. Basically, what she meant was, if we ever shout to the kids we will lose him/ her. She finally said that, the kids were so fragile when it comes to losing, there were cases of teasing and bullying to the kid who lost so we must prevent that from happening. 

After taking the advices from the 3-D homeroom teacher, we were ready to start our project because we have learned everything we had to know about treating third graders. The only thing left now was our exams, as soon as they finish we will start our project.

18.11.2016

Today is the day I started my project with my partner. Our exams were finally finished so we had a spare lunch break to work on our project. First of all, during the start of the third lesson (10:00 - 10:20), we got permission from our math teachers and rushed to the primary school building to announce our projects’ trial session to the third graders. We brought our rackets with us to amaze the kids. We showed ourselves to Mr. Avci and after that we started showing up in their classes. We had written speeches with us but we didn’t read them we spoke from our hearts because otherwise it wouldn’t be that effective in fact the number of attendance was outrageous. We told the kids that we were so excited about playing table tennis with them. The kids listened carefully and during our announcements we could hear some of them saying, “Oh my god I’m definitely going…”. I had a pink racket with me which belonged to my little sister and when i showed that pink racket to the classes, the female students were elated. My written speech was:

“Hello friends! I’m Tolga Ercan, coming from IB 11MI. I would like to play table tennis with you during your lunch breaks. For the ones who are interested in playing table tennis, I’ll be waiting for you at 12:40 next to the table tennis table. Come quick after you eat your lunch to avoid possible queues. Don’t get me wrong, anybody wanting to play can come, you don’t need to know how to play or be good at it. Everything clear buddies? See you at 12:40…”

This part of my project consisted three of the CAS learning outcomes

·  Undertaking new challenges

·  Planned and initiated activities

Undertaking new challenges

The act of teaching was a new challenge for me. I’m familiar with teaching but I have, so far, only taught things I was familiar with. For example, I work as a part time basketball coach but basketball is a thing that I play minimum five days a week so teaching it is not that big of a challenge. In terms of table tennis however, I barely played it, I know the basics and fundamentals of it but I do not know anything else. So in this project, I will not only teach the third graders table tennis, I will learn it myself as well. This seems like an unfamiliar challenge to me but I’m not willing to back down of it.

The first teaching session was simple. I played with the kids face to face, serving the ball to them and analysing their response. After the first serve I went next to them and showed how they must hold a racket and how to hit a ball with a backhand. My partner was serving the kids while i was showing them how to hit the ball. I had the opportunity to show 32 students how to play table tennis and I can assure this session was very effective because the kids were able to counter my serves (slow of course) and they were having a good time which is my primary goal, to have a good time.

Planned and initiated activities

Before the trial session. Me and my partner Ferhat planned what shall we do in the first ever practice with the kids. We decided to play with them face to face to see how they play. We had a simple method, while I was serving, Ferhat was showing the kids the fundamentals and while he was serving I was showing the fundamentals. The reason this process was a CAS outcome is that we didn’t come with this method simultaneously as we play, we planned it before we went there.