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.

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.