The circus comes to St. Mary's

This week at St. Mary's it was a circus theme and once again it was a ton of fun. This week, my group got to work with the pre-k kids once again. We started off in the classroom with the kids, doing all kinds of different activities. I started off with an icebreaker activity that the teacher had provided me with. I went around to each student with masking tape and marker, asking everyone their name and having them spell it out for me. This was a great first activity because I got to meet and talk to all the children and learn their names. After that, I went around and the room and tryed to conversate and have fun with as many children as I could. After about an hour and numerous little games here and there, it was about time to head into the gym for some real fun! While Dan read the children a great story, Amanda and I headed to the gym to set up our game that we had planned for the kids. The game we went with for this week was "Messy backyard". Even though this game was noted in the PE Hall of Shame, we still felt it was appropriate for this lab. Since we were trying to watch the children throw and catch, this game worked out great for that. To tie into the circus theme for the day, every time a child caught something that was thrown over the wall, they had to make an animal sound of our choice. I noticed that only a select number of children followed that rule, but I think the majority of the kids were too pre-occupied with their task at hand of keeping their backyard clean. It's amazing that we only have 1 more lab session left at St. Marys, this semester has flown by. I've had a great time so far at St. Mary's and can't believe it's coming to a close soon.

It's a Bird, It's a Plane....ITS SUPERMAN!!

On Wednesday October 21st, we were able to visit St.Mary's school once again. This time was a lot of fun because there was a superhero theme for this lab. For this theme I wore a superman t-shirt. That day my group got to work with the pre-k children for the whole two hours. For the first part we were in the classroom helping the kids with different activities like coloring, and playing with blocks. During the last part of our classroom visit, I got the opportunity to read the children a story called "Stanley the Stinkbug". This was a great story to go along with the superhero theme. I had a lot of fun reading the children this story and watching all their reactions when talking about Stanley the Stinkbug and how stinky he is. I could tell the kids enjoyed it more when I got into the book with them by faces and plugging my nose.





The next part of the lab, my group and I went into the gym to play some games with the children. For the game, we had chose to play "people to people". This was a great game to play with the pre-k kids because of all the variation that I could put into the game. Every time the kids had to run around when the music was playing, I could switch up how they moved around the gym. I was switching it up frequently by telling the kids to do things like hop, skip, jump, and get real low and walk around. This was a good tool because you could really see all the children's different skill levels with things like skipping and hopping. I had a great time working with the pre-k kids and loved all their reactions when you got down to their level and worked with them.

Video of St.Mary's and 255

Lab 1 at St. Mary's

Lab one at St. Mary's was a ton of fun. For this lab, my group and I set up a game called hot feet for the kids to play. This was a simple tag game where every student gets a bean bag and has to run around and throw it below the knees of another student. If a student got tagged by a bean bag, they had to go to a re-entry station to perform some sort of activity in order to get back into the game. During this game, I noticed that the majority of the kids were having a great time and were really enjoying the game. There were a few students, some boys and some girls, that did not want to participate at all and said they would rather be doing something else. Another problem that I noticed with this game was, the boys, always tried to throw their bean bag as hard as they possibly could. I think that this game was a success for the most part with the students. We played this game for a good amount of time and the majority of the students stayed with it and kept playing.

After playing hot feet and another game from the other group, we moved down to the cafeteria with the students. Since there was snacks waiting for the students, they quieted right down and focused on their snacks. After they ate, students had the chance to play with a variety of different toys and games. I sat down and started playing a game of checkers with a student that was not a big fan of the hot feet game and was a little hard to control in the gym. When we started playing checkers, I noticed that this student calmed right down and had no problem sitting quietly and playing. This surprised me at first but I just went with it and kept playing checkers. After the cafeteria, I got the chance to play a little game of duck, duck, goose! with many of the students. They loved this game and had many different varieties of this game, all which were fun to play. I had a great time playing games with the students for this first lab, and I can't wait to go back.