Saturday, May 8, 2010

Saving the day at St. Mary's Elementary!

For this weeks PED 201 LAB, our class provided a series of games and activities for the students with the theme being SUPERHEROES! This was by far my favorite theme for the semester because as soon as the children saw us in our costumes, their imaginations began firing away, constantly asking "who are you?!" or desperatly pleading for us to tell them what games we would be playing. Perhaps what was most inspiring was at the end of our lab during our debriefing, one of the assistants for St. Mary's applauded our enthusiasm and efforts for dressing up and getting into character. She explained to us that by doing so, we were able to get children, who had never participated before, to become excited and run over to the games we were setting up. Knowing that we had the ability to do that was one of the best feelings I have expereinced thus far in my career as a future Physical Educator.
Our games for the day began with an instant activity that I created myself which I named "Bank Robbery." For this game I placed a "bank" on one side of the gym and a jail on the other. Students were told they were the robbers and had to steal as much money as they could without being caught by the Superheroes(Cortland students) and if they were caught they had to go to jail and give the superheroes back the money they stole and could only be freed by another robber who had to give them some of their money. The students really enjoyed this game and loved the fake money I used. We played the game for quite a bit because none of the children seemed to get bored form it, all of them just wanted to keep stealing the money and see if they could avoid being captured. After this game, we moved into parachute games which the children were very excited about. We played games such as "JAWS" and "Popcorn" and both the children and Cortland students had a lot of fun, and I felt like a little kid again!

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Although we had a wonderful time during this lab, it was a little sad knowing that it was our last one. The work we had to put in was lengthy and tedious, however, I feel that the experiences we each took from St. Mary's was worth every second of it. I have adapted a number of teaching methods form this class and learned a lot about working with children, which I reflect on in my LAB 6 WRITE UP if you would like to see more. So its good bye for now to St. Mary's Elementary, but I will be returning in the Fall Semester to help as a lab assisstant for Professor Yang because I feel that through my ups and downs, I too can help shape the progress of up and coming PED 201 students just like my lab assisstants did.