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.

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!

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.

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.

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.