Party Penguins Rap it up

My best and worst sporting experiences and encouragement to younger athletes.

Prezi Presentation

Everyone loves parachutes!

This was our last time meeting at St. Mary's.  After all the stress, work, and planning, I am definitely going to miss working with the group of kids every week.  It really was a great experience and I can't wait to actually have a job doing this for the rest of my life!

 We all came up with a parachute game to do with the kids this week... My game was called sharks. All the students sit around the parachute with their feet straight in front of them under the parachute, which is being held at their waist. One person is the shark under the parachute and they pull on the leg of one of the kids around the parachute and switch places with them.  Everyone else around the parachute is waving it to make waves.  The kids all loved this game along with all of the other parachute games that we did.

Easter Lab

We were the gym group this lab which means we run the games at the beginning of class.  We orient our games around a certain set of skills so the rest of the class can assess how the kids perform these skills.  Our skills this week were dribbling a basketball and kicking a soccer ball.  I had a simple game where the students kicked the soccer ball around the gym while the music was playing.  When the music paused the kids would run to one of two goals set up and kick the soccer ball in.  This made it easy for the class to assess the students performing the skills based on soccer.  Overall, our games didn't really run that smoothly.  Basketball and soccer are hard skills to make games for kinder-gardeners and first graders just because they don't have the motor development necessary to perform the skills well enough to create fun games.  I actually had to alter my game to soccer because it was originally with basketballs but the class needed to see more soccer skills.  Based on the fact that I changed the game last minute I think it went pretty well.

Dinosaur Train!!!

This week at St. Marys our theme was Dinosaur Train! It is a PBS show that man of the students watch and enjoy.  I made a poster to go along with the theme and to use as a visual aid for my game. The poster included four pictures of dinosaurs- a Tyrannosaurus Rex, Pteranodon, Brachiosaurus, and a Triceratops. My game for the third graders was called Freezamania. In this game each student gets a partner and passes back and fourth while the music is playing.  This allowed them to practice the skills that we were observing this week. Then when the music stops the person with the ball has to chase their partner until the music is turned back on. My modification to this game is that they all have to run like one of the dinosaurs that I had on the poster.  This was a great game, the kids loved it and didn't get bored of it even after ten minutes of playing.  It was also fun for them to run like dinosaurs and pretty funny to watch as well.

Cowboy theme, yeehaaa!

This lab we had a western theme and many of the Cortland students, including myself, dressed up like a cowboy or cowgirl.  It was a lot of fun and it was funny to see the reaction of the students.  We observed Kinder- gardeners performing leaps, horizontal jumps, and slides. They were very good at these skills for the most part with only a few errors in their arm movements. The game I introduced to the students was called frozen beanbag.

This game includes: 

- All students get a beanbag and place it on top of their head.

- If the beanbag falls off a students head, that student is frozen.

- To become unfrozen another student must bend over, pick

up the beanbag and place it on the head of the student
who dropped it, without dropping their own. 

- Students can hold the beanbag on their head when they bend over.

- I modified this game to have all the beanbags represent cowboy hats so that they could all pretend they had cowboy hats!

Loony Tunes Lab 2!

Recently teaching at St. Mary's we had a cartoon theme. All of our games were cartoon related and the kids loved it. I liked the dance the most out of the activities we did. We had all the students that were still there, which wasn't many, do the sponge bob dance. It was a lot of fun watching preschool through first graders do the dance because most of the time they just stood their and smiled then occasionally they would do one of the movements. By the third time we did the dance, most of the students were doing the entire dance correctly. If we got to do it again I would make sure that the person who designed the dance had music to go with it.  The different skills that we observed were performed by two first graders and I was surprised at how well they actually did them. Their only main problem was in hopping which had a few errors in it.

Fun!!!

Wednesdays lab was in the gym at Park Center so we could prepare for the next time we go to St. Marys. We started out by playing blob tag with everyone for a warm up! It was a lot of fun but also pretty tiring when your it! We went over the hops with the class and talked about how the children of different ages would be able to handle more advanced games and younger children wouldn't be very good at hoping yet. Then we got to test out some of our games that we were going to use with the kids! People came up with some very creative games which were all a lot of fun to do with everyone. Our group, which was practicing for the special group, played a game where the people it were Elmer Fud and the people running were all Bugs Bunny. Elmer Fud has to hit the rabbits below the knee with a noodle to get them and the bunnies can jump into hula hoops, or their hole, to be safe for five seconds. When your tagged you have to sit down and someone has to come slap your hand to free you. It is a great game to play since our theme is cartoons! It should be a lot of fun to do with the kids at St. Mary's!

St Marys

Today I spent time with the preschool students at St. Mary's. We had a theme of healthy foods and did different activities to incorporate them. First the students colored pictures with different fruits and vegetables on them and told us what each of the foods was. Then we played the memory game in two different groups. The students loved playing to get matching cards with different foods on them.  At first I wasn't sure how it would go because it is usually a two player game and I had to make it work with over ten students. To do this I decided to divide the cards and play two separate games. Then with about six students in each game I divided them up into teams of three. The students had to use patience, memory, and team work along with a number of other skills while playing and all the students loved the game and wanted to continue playing when it was snack time. I really got a feel for working with the kids today because I had to change my plans to make it work for the whole class and it was a success. Theres nothing better than having the kids your working with tell you they loved the game that you worked on to put together for them and not want to stop playing when it was time to clean up!

Chapter 1

Fundamental skill development and assessment is very important to physical educators as well as the health of their students. Developmental physical education is physical education that emphasizes the acquisition of movement skills. Some of the aims of physical educators are to teach students to learn to move and to learn through movement. Out of these aims comes long term goals that physical educators have for their students. Major goals of physical educators include movement skill acquisition, physical activity and fitness enhancement, cognitive learning, and affective growth. By promoting these goals, physical education teachers use movement as an effective way to enhance self esteem, encourage positive socialization, and clarify values in their students.  The aims and goals of physical educators teach students a variety of fundamental skills they will need for the rest of their lives as well as build their confidence and self esteem which greatly impacts a students willingness to learn and participate.  The fundamental skills learned in physical education can be enhanced through practice and growth and can eventually reach more advanced levels as seen in the images. Further information on the importance of fundamental skill development can be seen in the websites provided below.


Fundamental motor skills 
Importance of development

Winter Break/ First class!

This is the first blog I have ever written. I have always thought blogger and twitter were kind of dumb but now I can see how it can be used to stay in touch and learn new things from other people in the physical education department on a professional level. When I'm home I am always trying to find ways to improve my teaching skills.  Over winter break I brought my brothers bowling and taught them the correct way to roll a bowling ball to the best of my ability (I'm only a decent bowler!) Also, I went to my brothers middle school basketball game and watched him play. After the game I pointed out some of the things he was doing wrong and gave him tips on how to protect the ball when dribbling and driving to the basket to make a layup. My two brothers are in 6th and 7th grade so they are a constant way to get better at teaching the necessary skills for different activities.  The first PED 201 class was a little overwhelming at first. When I got to St. Mary's I wasn't exactly sure what to expect and when I learned that we were going to be working with the students the first day I was a little nervous.  However after I went through the class I became a lot more comfortable with the kids and actually started having fun with them.  It was a great time and I'm excited to go back and work with them again. I went into St. Mary's nervous and unsure about myself but after one class I would say it's now one of the classes I look forward to going to!


Lab 1 questions