GOTR > GOT

I am going to say flat out that I do not like the Girls on Track curriculum.  The lesson book is not put together well at all.  The "Girls on the Run" lesson book, which is actually meant for elementary school students, is much more thorough and well thought through.

I think the problem is that nationally, there are more GOTR programs than GOT programs.  So I'm guessing not as much time and effort was put into creating lessons that are age appropriate for Middle School Students.  On one level, it's meant for a higher level of thinking in that each lesson is highly dependent on knowing the material from the previous lesson.  But still, they compensate by making the material where it’s more age appropriate for a 5-year-old…

The games are kind of confusing and I dunno, babyish? 

I explained one of the warm up activities to two of my co-workers, (a 26 woman and a 31-year-old man) and they were like, "huh?"  So I thought, "Alright, I have to tweak this to make it something that will work and that the girls will enjoy."  The lesson had to do with food groups and creating a dinner menu.  I know in GOTR we had a food group lesson, and it made sense.  The GOT warm-up would have been babyish and confusing to the girls at the same time... so I seriously changed up our warm-up activity.  Actually, I was proud of myself because the girls really seemed to enjoy it.  The problem is, I seem to have to do this with most of the lessons, and it isn't always easy.

For example, in one warm-up, when each girl ran to the coach, the head coach was supposed to give each girl a big "virtual hug" to represent a family member/loved on who cared about them.  I was seriously weirded out by this, and I knew the girls would be too.  So instead, I came up with loving things a parent/loved one might do for a middle school girl and wrote them on index cards, and handed one to each girl.  Stuff like:

"Takes me to the movies", "Believes in me even when I do not believe in myself", "Drives me to all my activities", "Helps me with my homework", "Makes me my favorite dessert on my birthday", "Takes me out shopping for new clothes for school" ... you get the drift. 

The assistant coach was to represent a friend with a simple "high five."  We thought this was appropriate for the lesson.  The girls thought that was totally lame. "Coach Jeri made us give her and each other high fives!"  So dumb.

In general, the topics are slightly more mature, though there is some slight overlap from GOTR.   And, as I stated before, they rely on knowing material from the previous lesson.

So, yesterday, I had a heart to heart with the girls.  "Do you think some of this is kind of babyish?"  A chorus of sarcastic "Noooo's" filled the hallway.  We talked about the things the girls didn't like about GoT vs. GotR and why.  I told them my two cents about what I liked - about lessons building each week and connecting to each other.  The girls whined a bit about that being difficult in comparison to GotR, where each lesson pretty much stood alone.  One girl asked, "Is that a different book?"  I told her it was.  Another girl said she thought we would be doing the same things as in the fall. 

So we came to a compromise.  I told them I was going to just take notes from the book, and rely on my notes to facilitate the lesson.  I wasn't going to read verbatim as the program requires.  I just said, "Wouldn't it be better if was just sat and talked about this stuff instead of me just reading it out of a book, because this just isn’t me?"  They all agreed.  Then we had a very sensitive lesson...

Empowered Bodies.  We had to talk about eating disorders.  More to come on this....