Friday, March 6, 2009

St. Mary's SuperHeroes


St. Mary's Lab#3: Super-Hero Theme

My teaching group, Jumping Jack and the Thriving Five, were once again the first group up to teach our game to the excited students.  This time however, we were equally excited because we had well planned out our activity and brought in multiple props to help set the theme.  Our group was given the game Endless Buckets, which was a game where students would pick out task cards, and then perform the activity on the card.  Our group brainstormed on how we could make this activity fun and relate it to the theme of the day.  We came up with a great idea of taking the students through Super-Hero Training camp.  We told the students that next week all the superheroes  were taking a vacation and they had asked for our help to help train them to take over!  Our whole group game in with superhero logos on our shirts along with capes on our backs, and right away we won over the attention of the students.  We set up stations that went along with the task cards that we wrote that focused on the locomotor skill of the day. We set up a City slide, Bat cave crawl, subway chase, and a villain toss.  I thought our activity went great! We had all the students up and participating. Our props enhanced our activity so much and it helped spark interest immediately, during the activity we also played superhero theme songs in the background. 

During this lab we were observing Anthony and Rowan performing leaping, horizontal jumping, and sliding. For the leap we encountered a problem with assessing, the students often performed the leap so fast that it looked like a run. We had to set up a way to get them to do it slow, such as saying lets leap in slow motion. Both Anthony and Rowan performed the leap great, taking off on one foot and landing on the other with both feet off the ground. Anthony had a little trouble reaching forward with arm opposite the lead foot. The horizontal jump Anthony had trouble with preparation for the jump by not flexing arms and knees with arms extended behind. He would just jump forward not creating any momentum for himself.  Also during the landing he lacked bringing his arms downward.  Rowan had good preparation but didn’t forcefully use arms in full extension over her head. Rowan also had a good landing landing with both feet simultaneously and bringing arms downward. Lastly, we observed the slide. Both Anthony and Rowan, performed the slide well. The only thing they didn’t have was a period of having both feet off the ground, they tended to drag their trail foot on the ground.

To end the day, Pam and I led the group activity. We did the Cha Cha Slide. This was a great activity because it is a song they are all familiar with and it is also filled with locomotor skills such as hopping and sliding!

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