Thursday, December 17, 2009

Do Not Let Them Get The Best Of You

Cardio Fun

Its time to get that body moving!! For our last Lab of the semester, I taught cardio activities. I felt very confident in what I was about to teach. I have been playing sports all my life so I felt like I knew a thing or two about cardio fitness. We had three teachers going on that day and I was the last to teach. I build my lesson around aspect of muscular strength. In my lesson, I had the class doing different kinds of pushups, situps and a bit of carido exercises. First thing, I had the students do a quick warm up so that nobody would pull a muscle. When I was doing the warm up, I was going over what we would be doing today in class just so that everybody was on the same page. When I was doing that, I should have turned down the music at the time because I wanted to have everybody hear what the directions were. Instead, I had to shout to the class what we would be doing. Pushups are a hard exercise to do. So I tried different activities dealing with pushups so that nobody would get bored and tired. I had them doing a normal pushup on the ground, then having them switch to the board. From there, we did a lot of different variations of pushups. One arm on the ground while the other one on the board, two arms on the board, feet on the board, clap pushups and one arm pushups. Everybody was doing very well. They kept right up and they were into it. Going into this lesson I felt very confident on what was going on. I knew my time limits on each activity so I did not have to worry about the time. I also thought that the music helped a lot. That gave them a little motivation to keep on going. Some things that I need to improve on is that I need to get more involved in the class. Students see the teacher doing the activity,then the students will want to join in. I thought that I needed to give back a little bit more feedback to the students and give them a little bit more motivation. I also need to improve on my visual aids. I did not even use them when I was teaching. I had Ricky demonstrate a pushup for the class and that is when I should have pinpointed on what he was doing right.If I were to teach this again, I would improve on my visual aids, volume of the music and to get more involved with the lesson. Overall, I had a great time teaching this lesson! The students were well involved and were having a good time. That is what I like to see!!

Thursday, December 10, 2009

10 hours


I had the privilege of working with great students at St. Mary's this semester! I went just about every Monday from 3-5 pm, working with the kids. We played some different games, sang a few songs, had snacks with them, and overall just had a great time. We also had the privilege of going in the morning to St. Mary's and observing what actually takes place in the classroom setting. We got the kids for an after school program and now we had a chance to see what they actually did during the day. How they start off they day, what they are learning. When I went in on a Tuesday morning, they were learning how to correctly spell their names on a sheet of paper. This experience I had working with my classmates and the students from St. Mary's, is an experience I will not forget.