Monday, March 29, 2010

Jugglers Unite!


This time in class I had to teach a Juggling lesson for Lab C. I thought it went fairly well. Out of the four people that went I was the last to go that day so I decided my lesson would consists of juggling tricks! The way I designed it was I took them around the gym showing them all five of the tricks and after that they were free to go to any station they wanted to and practice the skill. Some of these tasks included juggling 2 balls in one hand, partner juggling, walking around the lines of the gym, the claw, and under the legs. Everyone seemed to enjoy the activities and I think they liked the fact that they could jump around to whatever activity they wanted and they weren't timed and had to go station to station.
Something that I thought I did well on was I went around to all the different stations and talked with the students and if they were doing the activity well I went and changed the task for them to make it easier or harder. Also, I gave feedback to a lot of different students. Another thing I thought I did well on was at each station I had a poster on the ground so all the students there could see it and on the poster it listed the cues so they were constantly being reinforced the cues. Something else I forgot to go over in my lesson plan was my signal for attention and my safety statement. Both of these are important because you need to be able to get the classes attention when you want it.
Something I could have work on was my back was to the class for a lot of the time. At one point I went off to the side and had my back to everyone while I was trying to find clubs to use. When this happened one student, Harris, started throwing balls at the bleachers. When I first walked over there I didn't know what I was going to do but when I got there I asked what was going on and if he wanted to take a break and get some water to cool off. Next I gave him the clubs that were in my hand and asked him to try that. That way it was a challenge for him because he seemed to be doing well with the balls. Once he took the clubs he did well and seemed to forget about throwing the balls at the bleacher which was a good thing.



time code




Tuesday, March 2, 2010

Calling all Rockers



This week in lab we had to teach a 7 minute lesson and incorporate different tasks. As you can hear in my audio and read in my transcript I was nervous and hesitant and even had to stop in the beginning because I forgot what I was going to say next. It's like everything I had just went out the window because honestly I wasn't as prepared as I should have been. The day before we had a snow day so I was banking on having another one the next day, but boy was I wrong! I thought I had a good hook because I tried to try in the theme of being a "rock star" because Yang constantly refers to us as that. I had students imagine that the gym was their stage and the jump ropes were their guitars. This seemed to work well and got the students attention. Another strong point in my audio is I gave more feedback to the class then I have in previous labs but the only downfall is I didn't mention to whom I gave feedback too. I didn't use many peoples name so good thing I had the video so I could see which students I was talking too. I also thought I did well by pinpointing some people in class who were doing well. I had 2 males and 2 females demonstrate together by forming their own "band".
A weakness I saw was when I was putting together the time code, I noticed I didn't make as much use of the activity as I should have. Next time I'll try to have less instrustion and more activity time because when you get into a real classroom the kids just want to play and have fun and not listen to someone stand up there and talk so much. And because as a physical educator I want to see these kids moving all the time.


During the debriefing stage I checked for understanding by asking the students the cues again and the recited them back to me correctly. Keeping with the "rocker" theme I ended by saying next week we would do an encore. Hopefully leaving the students wanting to come back next week for more. For my next teaching assignment I need to bring in visual aides because if kids have questions they can just refer to the visual aid and it brighten ups the gym by giving them something to look at. Another good suggestion is to add music. Since I went with the rocker theme I could have played rock music in the background instead of the class being quiet and hearing the humming of a gym it could have livened the place up a bit and it would have tied in nicely with my theme.