Tuesday, April 28, 2009
St. Mary's lab #6
St. Mary's was a great experience for me to learn things about kids that I did not notice before.
Monday, April 27, 2009
St. Mary's lab #5
This was a good lab because we worked well as a group and it was a team effort and we each came up with good ideas. At the beginning of the lab we knew what we were going to do but each of us had our own thing we were going to do to it to make it more fun for the children. I enjoyed working with the children at St. Mary's it gave me opportunity to get more experience.
St. Mary's lab #4
It is important to get children involved as much as possible. Another thing also to avoid children sitting out on activities adapt the activity to make it something they may enjoy. What I found also helps is when you have different activities happening throughout the gym such as some kids playing basketball and some playing soccer. Another thing is having some sort of discipline. At least having a loud voice helps to direct the kids in doing some activities because they won’t listen to you if you do not have a loud voice. As well not having enthusiasm in your voice doesn’t make the children listen very well to your activity and how you describe it. Sometimes you need to make yourself a kid in a sense. Make yourself interested in the activity so then you know the kids will get interested in the activity.
St. Mary's lab #3
I used a calming voice that was also making things simple for their level. I try to get them excited for what is coming up next and I feel like they enjoyed it. I made a game where batman was trapped and they had to retrieve joker cards to get batman out. The kids enjoyed the game quite a bit the only problem was the Sean got jumped on afterwards and hurt. I wouldn’t try screaming to explain things because it just gets your voice tired and the kids are less likely to listen. If you seem interested in the activity more than likely they will be interested as well.
If you are corky, kids will turn to that. If you are interesting the kids will love it. One thing kids love is props and the way you implement them into your lesson. They can relate things to props better because kids at a young age are primarily visual learners. I found that certain items do not work very well such as using a parachute didn’t work very well because the students would just jump on it whenever they had the chance.
St. Mary's lab #2
I believe that our activity with the parachute was not very easy. Most of the kids did not listen especially the boys did not listen because they were fascinated by the parachute. Most of the kids just shook it when they weren’t supposed to and were running underneath nonstop. I found that strategies that do work well are describing the game like it is the greatest game they will ever play. If you are not enthused teaching the game the kids will not be enthused to play the game.
The focus of lab 2 was running, hopping, and galloping. Some students didn’t hop as well as others or even correctly hop like the other kids did. Most kids do not know the difference between a hop and a jump or a leap. Most kids were trying to hop on two feet. I observed Casey and Michael and they were 6 years old. They were fairly good at doing each skill. I don’t believe that Michael knew exactly the correct way to gallop. He didn’t exactly bend his knees the whole time he was doing it. But it could be just that they do not know how to do the skills in general. But overall I believed that the age group of 6 years old is well educated physically with these skills. But you can obviously notice the difference between skill ability among kids that are more active than kids that are less active outside the school environment.
St. Mary's lab #1
One activity that I did with one of the Pre-K students was soccer. Nikolas was kicking around a soccer ball and I attempted to play defense on him and Nik would kick it past me or between my legs. Once the ball would go past me I would run it down then attempt to dribble around Nik which ended up in him playing defense. I didn’t notice at the time what I was doing but I was teaching him fundamental motor activities such as defense and kicking the ball. This made me quite happy because I wasn’t even trying to teach him these skills I was just playing a simple game and he learned things.