Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Na na na na na na na na- BATMAN!


This past week's lab at St. Mary's we had a super hero theme and I must admit, it was very fun to dress up. The kids reacted really well to it. When I first walked in, I had never seem them so excited. They were tugging on my cape and asking me who I was. The costumes definitely helped gain the childrens interest. When explaining the games they were a lot more attentive and wanted to do whatever we said. This week we also worked with the parachute and they went nuts. They had a lot of fun doing activities like the mushroom where they got to go under the parachute and run around under it. I am sad to say that it was my last week at St. Mary's because, even though I was very nervous in the beginning of the semester, the experience there has helped me tremendously. If I was ever thrown into a teaching situation without this experience I would not be able to make it through. I am very grateful that they allowed us to have our labs there.

Tuesday, April 20, 2010

To Infinity and Beyond!


This past week at St. Mary's School I got the chance to work with the Pre-k kids. This was very exciting for me because throughout highschool I always babysat kids of these age so I had some experience with them. Because it was such a nice day we got to be outside on the play ground where after hearing an exciting "Toy Story" story and handing out fun stickers of the characters I got to play tag. It's really funny to watch a whole group of kids this age play tag because they don't really get the concept of being "it" and it goes from one student being it to about 5 and next thing I knew I was being bombarded by all the "its" and had to get to the base. After that we went inside and they got to sit down and color their favorite characters. One student kept asking me to help her and ended up having me color the whole picture for her while she just colored Bo Peeps dress. Watching the coloring was very interesting. They all had different ways of holding the crayons and they all picked such funny colors for certain things. Before all this we got to evalute a student on her kicking and dribbling skills. It was hard to evalute the kick because a lot of the time she ended up dribbling the ball like she was playing soccer instead of a full out kick. After a few modifications we got to see a real kick and she did almost everything on the checklist perfectly. She also performed really well for the dribbling. She always started out perfect but after a few dribbles she lost it a little but had no problem picking the ball up and trying again, which was great to see!

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Easter Bunny comes to St.Marys!

This past week in lab we had an Easter theme. i thought this worked out really well. The kids were very excited about the whole thing and were a little wild at first but it definitely helped out my energy levels when they acted like that. I was very please to see that they really enjoyed my game. They took to it right away and had a lot of fun with it. They didn't always listen to the rules but they were having so much fun i usually just let it slide. One girl i got to work with individually and i really enjoyed it. She listened very well and definitely improved on her throwing and catching skills while i was working with her. After seeing the improvement i felt very proud of myself.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Prezi!

Today I used the program "Prezi" for the first time. It was a little confusing at first but once I got going it got a lot easier. It was really interesting to use and can definitely come in handy in the future because it is a lot more fun for people to look at than a power point presention. I made my first presentation on childhood development.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

An Overview of Developmental Phys Ed.

Today, in the U.S., teachers are facing the three critical issues of childhood obesity rising rapidly, the alarming rate of in-school and community voilence among young people, and early puberty having impostant psychosocial ramifications. Some goals of the concept of "Developmental Physical Education" are cognitive learning, affective growth, movement skill aquisition, and physical acticity and fitness enhancement.
Development of the whole child is important and some factors that explain the relationships leading to this development are biology of the individual, requirements of the movement task, and conditions of the learning enviornment. The difference between individual appropriateness and group appropriateness is indivisual approriateness is the inclusion of learning experiences into the physical education program geared to learners phases and stages of motor development and the levels and stages of movement skill learning which is more important than group appropriateness which is the inclusion of learning experiences into the physical education experience based on chronological age or grade-level.
There are a few different types of movement skills which include locomotion and manipulation. Some examples of locomotor movements are walking and leaping, jumping, and hopping and some examples of manipulation skills are throwing, kicking, and punting. Stability is also a fundamental movement skill and can be axial, like bending and stretching, or can be static and dynamic, like rolling and dodging. Physical fitness can be defined as the combonation of the concepts of health related fitness and performance related fitness.

St. Mary's meets the Olympics!

This past week at St.Mary's was a lot different than last week. This week we got to assess students and actually observe specific things that they did. Doing this was very interesting. It was cool to see the differences and similarities between the two young children we observed. We observed mostly two kindergarten students, Z and MM. At first the activity that they were given they were more interested in playing with the noodles than doing the activities like hopping, running, and galloping, but it was fun to watch so I didn't mind. With their second activity it was easy to see that the young girl was better at some things than the boy was. To me, gender didn't really make a difference because she was better at certain skills like galloping while he was better at running. At the end my group introduced a game called "silly dragon" where the front person tried to get the scarf that the last person in the line was holding. At first the kids didnt really get it but with a little guidance they soon picked it up and were laughing until they caught the tail. I really look foward to next week when I get to spend some more time with the students at St. Mary's.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Hall of Shame

After reading the article "Hall of Shame" I would have to agree with it. Many of the games in the article are not appropriate for the classroom setting. They do not have enough physical activity for the students and most of the time when the physical activity is happening a lot of students are being embarassed. Although these games were a big thing to do when I was young, I would not use them in the future in the classes I teach.
Some of the games, like dodgeball, can really diminish a childs self esteem. While it can help improve a childs throwing and catching abilities, it can also embarass them if they are unable to perform these skills. It is a game that singles out some students that are weaker in these two skills and not in a good way. When hit these students are forced to leave the game and have even less physical activity.
I do believe that games like dodgeball and the other games in the "Hall of Shame" can be modified to make students want to participate and to include much more physical activity for everyone in the game.

Monday, February 15, 2010

First Lab at St. Marys!

This past Wednesday was my first real lab at St Mary's School. It was a lot different than I thought it would be. Instead of just watching the kids and trying to observe them we got to actually play with them. This made it a lot easier to connect with them and see everything that they were doing in detail. At first, my group was in the gym and we taught them a whole bunch of new tag games. They were very into it at first and loved all the different tag games. The students were young, around 6 or 7 and they just wanted to get out there and run around so they didn't listen to intruction very well and got bored of each variation every few minutes, but once we switched the taggers or the game they were just as excited as they were in the begininng. Then, we went down into the cafeteria to get our pemanent group. I sat inbetween two boys who wanted to talk about "kid stuff" and a girl who was sitting by herself drawing a unicorn. The girl drawing was actually very good for her age. She colored in the lines and even though she was drawing a fantasy animal she used realistic colors for a unicorn like white and light pinks and purples instead of bright greens and blues and yellows like a younger kid might pick. The two boys were very entertaining to listen to and eventually they decided to play mancala. I had never heard of the game and it was definitely fun to learn even though they got frustrated when having to explain it. Then, we took our group up to the gym to play more tag games. Our group was older than the group we were first with and even though they definitely listened better than the younger kids they were not as into the tag games. To motivate them to play we would use the tag games that had movie or tv characters. They played for awhile and were better at dodging the taggers than the younger students. this showed that age makes a difference in motor skills because they used some strategy instead of the younger students who ran around like chickens with their heads cut off. They got tired of playing tag after two or three different variations and then wanted to play basketball or jump rope. Eventually when our group got too small to play tag games we let them seperate into these different groups. I stayed with two girls, Ameila and Kara, who enjoyed jumping rope and hoola hooping. They were both very good at these activities and I was shocked to see all the different things they could do with the hoola hoop and I tried to remember if I was ever that good when I was nine. I look foward to returning to St Marys to see if any of the students remember me and to learn more about them.

Sunday, January 31, 2010

First day at St Marys

The other day was our lab's first day at St. Marys. The kids were amazing. They were very well behaved and were always wanting to do something fun. It was cool to see the differences between the older kids and younger kids such as how they went down the stairs ( Pre-K kids went down with having to have two feet on each step while the older kids were able to go down one foot on each step). I am looking foward to going back in a few weeks.