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.