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.