Lab 3

1. Observe the St. Mary’s student(s) as they participate in the activities. Describe the variability of the movement patterns you observed. Be sure to note with whom you worked, what grade they were in, and any differences in age, gender, or ability.
Today we observed Sophia and Shamus perform activities set up by our peers that entailed the leap, horizontal jump, and the slide. Sophia is in kindergarten and is five years old. Shamus is a first grader who is six years old. In observing the students locomotor skills they both appeared to have difficulty with the arm movements while performing the leap and the horizontal jump. Even in the sliding movement they both kept their arms at their sides instead of having them elevated for balance. I did not see any difference in ability or mechanics due to the age and gender difference.






2. Describe “teaching strategies” that YOU used today towards connecting with the children. What were they? How did YOU use them? What was the effect? Were there any strategies that were more effective than others? If so, why?
Connecting with the group that I worked with today was a little challenging. The groups of five and six year olds were pretty high strung and were obviously excited to see the college students today. Demonstration and checking for understanding were paramount today as we played rock, paper, and scissor tag. In hindsight we should have used a game that demonstrated the skills that we had to teach but we easier to comprehend for the age level that we were working with. The kids had fun but some did not understand the rules. I thought that checking for understanding helped as it assisted the kids in listening to our instructions and then performing the activity.




After being at St. Mary’s for these past weeks and observing and working with the students, can you briefly describe an effective strategy (or strategies) that you used to capture the children’s attention and keep them on task for your activity.
As I previously mentioned checking for understanding helped with keeping the students on task for our activity. As some of the students became distracted while we discussed our instructions I would purposely ask that student to recite what we as a group were going to call in our rock, paper and scissor game. I used this strategy as well as asking those who appeared distracted to tell the rest of the group what they wanted to call for the upcoming game.