Lab B

 I thought my teaching in lab b is a steady improvement from lab a.  One major obstacle I faced in lab b was not being able to teach in the gym.  Instead I had to teach in the squash courts.  For me this was a good experience.  Unfortunately I did not do what I quite wanted to do because of the confined space.  I wanted to have the class in groups of three so everyone was active, instead I had to have two sets of ropes going with a line of 4 or 5 people waiting to jump in which I did not want to have.  Although we had a change in where we had to teach I learned a lot from it.

The biggest thing I learned was to adapt to what you have to teach with.  Seeing that I had a much smaller space to teach my lesson I had to learn on the fly how to change my lesson to adapt to my surroundings.  I feel that I am getting stronger being able to get up in front of my peers to teach, I am not as nervous as I was on the first day and I can hear it in my voice.  I'm still not perfect in my teaching abilities but I am continuing to improve and will continue to work hard to become the best teacher that I can be.

Mini Conference

Last week on October 7 I attended the SUNY Cortland mini conference.  This was a very neat experience and I really enjoyed it.  I helped work the registration desk during the morning shift.  I just wanted to get involved and help out in some way.  Also I attended the big parachute and little toys activities workshop.  Mr. John Smith came to present this activity.  Mr. Smith is a retired national teacher of the year and is currently a consultant for Flaghouse Inc.  I found this workshop to be very useful because I can use these activities that I learned and incorporate them into my physical education class.  We learned many activities for a large parachute and some activities with little toys such as noodle bits, foam pizzas, and shake sticks.  I really enjoyed this workshop and I hope I can use some of these activities because I want to be an elementary teacher and the students would absolutely love them.  Here is a link to get some ideas for games and products that may come in handy as a teacher. http://www.flaghouse.com/

Observations for Lab 2

Monday's lab was very enjoyable for me.  I felt like the students really enjoyed the games that they participated in.  All of the students seemed very enthused and eager to be there, and also seemed really excited to see us there to interact with them.  I made a poster to go with the theme of the day, and the theme was friendship.  I helped create a poster that spelled "FUN" with the Spongebob FUN song lyrics on it.  As for our game that Devon and I had the students play, I felt went very well.

 Yes, their are some things that we need to improve but overall I feel that it went very smoothly.
We related it to Finding Nemo, and the students really enjoyed that because they could relate to the movie.  We had to save Nemo and avoid getting tagged by the sharks.  The students were very eager to play it that it was difficult keeping their attention to finish explaining the game to them.  I was very pleased with the way the game went.  Also the students really enjoyed the chicken dance too.



 It is very gratifying seeing their faces light up when they are playing the games.  I really look forward to going back their to work with them again.  Also I look forward to working with children in the future to further their physical education in order to lead a physically fit and active lifestyle.

How do you better dodgeball?

Dodgeball is a game that was played in physical education classes and now it is placed in the hall of shame.  Dodgeball is considered inappropriate in the educational setting because it singles out students as well as having students inactive during games.  I personally feel it should be in the physical education curriculum but with some modifications.  You can have targets at the back of the gymnasium that the students have to hit instead of aiming for other classmates.  But in order to knock down the targets you have to stand a specified distance away and you can have defenders that can try to block the targets.  If you hit someone that is not a defender you would go to one side of the gym and can try to hit the targets from that specified area, and once one target gets knocked down everyone who went to 'jail' can be released.  This way you are not having students targeted, they are targeting a stationary object.  Also everyone is active trying to knockdown the targets, it helps with the issue that no one is sitting down anymore.  As a physical education teacher we want everyone to be active as much as we can!!

Lab A2

I felt that this lab was much easier to teach than on the first day.  I felt like I made great strides teaching from the very first day of class until now.  The first time I taught, I felt shell shocked because I have never taught before and did not know what I really needed to do.  I was much more comfortable teaching, and I will continue to get more and more comfortable as I continue.  I was much more prepared for this lab because I had a structured lesson plan written out.  Also in my notebook I wrote out my hook and what I was going to say. Using cues is an important factor in teaching as well.  I developed some cues to use like clap once to get the students attention, and clap twice to have them bring it in.  It was much easier to do my transcript too, because I could actually here myself talk.

I was much louder when I talked and gave directions.  I though my hook was very good because I related it to a real life situation.  It is important to relate it to the students because if you just start out just giving directions and backgrounds the students will lose attention fast.  Over all I feel that this lab was a very drastic improvement from the very first day.

I look forward to bettering myself as a physical educator, and becoming an influence on students life's to better their fitness level.

Chapter 4 questions

2) A teacher can improve communication with learners during lessons came come in a variety of ways.
The teacher should give lead by giving a hook.  For example if your teaching goalkeeping and you want to have your students go down onto a knee so they keep their body behind the ball you could relate it to proposing and how you go down on a knee to propose.  You want to engage the students so they are eager to learn and participate in the lesson.  By doing this it is an easy way to let the student know what they are going to be doing today.  Letting the student know what their doing is important because you want them to have an understanding to what they are going to be learning.  Another way to improve communication is to make the lesson personal.  Either you can relate it to personal experiences; or you could have demonstrations can call up the students by name to demonstrate what you want them to do.  One big thing is when engaging students is to be dynamic.  Nobody likes to have a monotone who does not ever vary the class and how it is going to be taught.  As a physical education teacher it is important to keep your students actively engaged.  You can do this by changing how you demonstrate lessons, varying the way you talk, dress up to teach the parts, along with many other ways to keep your students actively involved.

3) Demonstrations are important for effective teaching.  With a demonstration you want to make sure that  all your information is correctly taught to your students.  If all possible you want to have your students perform the demonstrations because it gives them a better understanding for what you want them to do.  Also as a teacher you should try to have the demonstration performed a couple of times from different angles just incase it was hard for students to see and to allow the students to see what is expected from a couple of different angles.  Students are more likely to do what you want them to do if they see it visually, and not just what they hear from you verbally.  Additionally you should always check for understanding (CFU).  You can ask questions about the task, and what is asked of them to do.  You should refrain from asking "Do you understand?" because it is an open ended question, and students are less likely to answer these type of questions.

5) Learning cues identify the important information for given skills.  Good learning cues involve accuracy because if what you teach is not accurate the what you teach them and how the perform it will be obstructed for the rest of their life.  Also you want to highlight the most important cues as well.  A second characteristic to have is that the learning cues are critical to the task that is taught.  You do not want to overwhelm the students so it is important that you highlight the most important concepts.  Cues are best taught with few rather than too many.  It goes back to not overwhelming the student, you want to keep it simple and keep them engaged in the lesson.  The last is that they are appropriate for the age of the learner.  You are not going to teach high schools who already know how to throw a ball the basic techniques on how to throw.  Vice versa you are not going to teach very specific steps how to throw to early elementary students.  You want to teach them what their skill level is going to allow them to do.

Learning cues for teaching how to throw a ball:

Beginning learners:
Task: Throwing a football to their partner
Cue:  Make a T with the ball in your throwing hand up, step forward with your opposite leg, point and throw swinging your arm toward your target.
Task: Throwing a ball to a moving target
Cue: You want to throw the ball in front of them so when they continue to move in that direction the ball will meet them at a spot.
Task: Following through on a throw
Cue: After you throw the ball you want to swing the leg you did not step with forward over the imaginary bucket

Advanced learners:
Task: Playing catch with a football
Cue: Step with your opposite leg, make sure your arm goes down, back, up, then forward.  Make sure you are square with your target
Task: Throwing a ball to a receiver
Cue: Throwing a ball in a game has different sinerios.  The distance is always different, how hard you have to throw it, where you throw it to.
Task: Follow through and grab your pocket.
Cue: Follow through on your throw bringing your hand and touching your opposite pocket, opening up your shoulders and hips.

Questions for chapter 2

3) The requirements for learning a motor skill are the prerequisites, clear idea of the tasks, the implication for the teacher, motivational/attentional disposition to the skill, practice, and feedback.  Each step is very important to learning motor skills.  The prerequisites involves already having experience with previous easier skills that they have mastered.  The clear idea of the task is important because the students need to have a concrete idea of what they are going to be learning and what they are trying to do with the next task.  The implication of the teacher is important because you as the teacher need to make sure you have an open line of communication between you and your students of what you expect them to preform.  The motivational/attentional dispositions to skills the students need to be eagerly engaged in wanting to learn and perform the skills they are practicing.  Practice is important because you want to the student to be the best they can be at preforming the specified tasks.  You have to keep practicing to better yourself at each skill, your muscles have to be trained.  Feed back is important because as a teacher you want to help each student preform at the best of their ability.  You should always give the positive feedback first because you are expressing what they excel at.  After this is done you should give them the feedback of what they need to work on the better themselves at the skills.
4) Open skills are skills regulated by changes in the environment.  An example of this skill would be fielding a ground ball in baseball.  As a fielder you never have the same ground ball hit to you, everyone comes at you at a different angle and even take strange hops.  A closed skill would be a skill where the environment remains constant.  An example of this skill is shooting penalty kicks in soccer, the distance is constant as well as the goal.  A discrete skills are preformed with complete starts and stops.  An example of this would be pitching mechanics, they have a direct start and stop.  A serial skills are skills that are put into series.  An example of this is hitting a baseball then running to first base.  You combine hitting and running as one skill.  Each skill should be taught in a way that makes sense.  It does not any sense to teach serial skills before closed skills if the student does not know how to hit, run, or any other complex skill that is takes multiple skills to learn.  I feel that everyone can teach these skills in their own distinct styles as long as they make sense to teach them in order.  As a coach it would be much easier to teach these skills because to move on to the more complex skills for that sport they have to master the fundamentals.