Lab 4

Today’s theme for lab was food day. Our group decided to create a throwing and catching game involving pizza. We made an invisible oven in the middle of the gym and we had teams at the baseline of each side of the court. We had pizza’s that the children had to create with different toppings that the kids had to throw to each other. Some of the items we had the kids throw were waffle balls, hockey pucks, tennis balls, and rubber chickens. During the middle of the game we encountered a problem where many of the children couldn’t reach their partner with the throws. We stopped the game and made the oven smaller and this made it easier for the kids to reach across the oven to the other side.

Some days the children were on really good behavior and seemed ready and willing to play the game. On other days the kids have been really wired up and ready to just go crazy. It was on those days that I found I have faced the most difficulties. For example, the day we played the parachute game the kids were bouncing off the walls. We couldn’t stop them from shaking or running under the parachute no matter how hard we tried. I got to experience that lab twice that week and both time the parachute activity triggered something in the kids that made them go wild. On days like that it made it a lot more difficult to play the games and play them affectively. As for the environment, having limited space is definitely hard to work with and also not having the proper equipment for every activity that we want to play is sometimes difficult. Although these challenges can be difficult at times it is definitely great experience because I’m sure almost no school or school district will have a perfect teaching environment all of the time. So having to make adjustments and compensate for things will definitely prove as a great tool for the future.

Honestly, I don’t think is really a way to solve the difficulties I wrote about in question 1. Children will be children and they are not always going to calm and on their best behavior. Nor would I want them to be I feel that P.E. class is a time where kids can unwind, have fun and be active. As for the environment, it is what it is. We have the space and equipment we have and we work with it. It’s not a horrible situation anyway; I would think that many schools have it much worse than St. Mary’s. I just felt that it was a minor inconvenience.