CAST -- Cortland Adapted Swim Team

Every Wednesday night this semester, I had the wonderful experience to work with the Cortland Adapted Swim Team. This certainly made me grow as a professional in my career and as a person. Each week I worked with a boy named Jacob who was autistic and ADHD, he was a wonderful little boy and a great swimmer! Each week we worked on refining his strokes, he was very talented in freestyle, which he preferred to swim mostly. It was a challenge at time to get his attention and keep him on task, but after a few weeks I got to really know how to manage his workouts. It was great to work with Jacob and along with the rest of the team, if I was not so busy with softball next semester I would definitely continue with this and I suggest it to anyone who is looking into the Adapted Physical Education field!!

PERFECT VIDEO CLIP FOR OUR CLASS!!

After doing some good ol fashioned YouTube searching for PE material, I came across this video that truely fits what Professor Yang has brought to our attention as growing PE teachers. This video shows all the important technology we have experienced this semester through 255, 434 and other classes. It is great to see how much younger students enjoy these activities and how we will certainly be using technology for future lessons!

LAB D - Jump Rope For Heart Workout

Whoa! Where did this semester go? Did we all really just complete Lab D? I thoroughly enjoyed doing this lesson due to a great signal of attention. I felt my music was highly important for the flow of the lesson and to keep the students motivated to work hard on their cardio activity. I was very anxious to begin my lesson, but had to wait to go last, which is never fun. The focus of my lesson was to have the high schoolers refresh their jump rope skills or learn new ones to assist with the following week of Jump Rope For Heart at the Local Elementary School. The workout consists of 8 stations lasting just about a minute each with different jump skills at each, I felt my visual aids were awesome with the cues and picture demonstration. Every time the music changed, the rotation occurred. Although the music was great, I could not travel very far throughout the gym because I had to keep changing the song every minute. This led me to not noticing two students leave and jump in the hallway, which was embarrassing but once I noticed I handled the situation properly and made the students follow me and begin at the closest station. I failed to notice Danielle not jumping the whole time, but eventually I told her to try hard for the kids and the cause. It was time to wrap things up and of course I ended with good ol Nsync- Tearin Up My Heart, which was a great ending (right Professor Yang?). I think Professor Yang especially like the Nsync and flow to the music. I liked using the music and heart rate monitors as my technology, I must compile all my information together to see how well the class did with the workout, but I definitely saw hard work and a lot of sweat, which is always good! Especially at our age and the high school level, everyone takes care of their weight and jump roping is a great start....MORE CARDIO LESS LARDIO!!!!!

PAPERWORK OF PE!
Jump Rope Workout Time Coding Form

This Feedback Analysis Form definitely shows how much my teaching has changed since one of the first lessons, my first lesson I only gave feeback to one student, now I ALMOST go the whole class!!

Teaching Skill & Criteria

This list is a great set up for all us future PE teachers to follow to make sure we are the best!

Teaching Skill & Criteria

255 Works as a Team to be the Best!

If we all work as a team, we can help each other become the best physical educators SUNY CORTLAND has seen!!!

(Thought I would share with everyone, one of my absolute favorite images! As I have gone skydiving a couple times, I would put it under the label of "ExtremePE" :) )

Starting to finally figure GOOGLEdocs out!

It has been a long time coming, but they're finally here! A look into the paperwork side of Physical Education, and a few forms from Part 1 and Part 2 of Tinikling!

Tinikling Part 1 Time Coding Form

Tinikling Part 1 Feedback Analysis

Tinikling Part 2 Transcript

TINIKLING LESSON PLAN


I definitely enjoyed teaching Tinikling and hope the class did as well! Please refer down to my reflection post on day 2 of Tinikling!


(Hey, I could get the hang of this GOOGLEdocs thing! Maybe use it for other classes as well!)

Explorer Scavenger Hunt -- DJ + Freddie's Lesson

This lesson was very creative and had plenty of technology! The use of the cell phones, heart rate monitors, pedometers and now the blogs, certainly implies tons of technology. All 3 domains were hit, I enjoyed making our own flag in the beginning to establish our team creativity and symbol. The explorers were a great idea (nice hat Freddie!), but the information and visual aids for the explorers definitely could have been larger. What I take from this lesson was the idea of cell phones for scavenger hunt clues, with the popularity of cell phones it would be great to use them for fun for a lesson. The bad part about the cell phone use is due to all the messages going to one phone, it took much longer to get the clues out, which cuts out on some activity. We were definitely active throughout the whole hunt, running from the field house to the stadium and back got our hearts pumping! This was a very active lesson, gave us knowledge on explorers and had some creativity, I most definitely will keep this set up for a lesson in mind for future lessons.

TINIKLING - DAY 2

Time for tinikling again! This time around I focused generally on the free foot in the tinikling dance, which is the foot farthest from the side to start the dance on. If you were on the left of the sticks, your left foot would be free to intiate the first cue of out, then the left foot would be the solid base, and same goes for start on the right foot. Another important thing I emphasized was to always have the hands behind the back and eyes up. While I was demonstrating the free foot, my back was to the class, which was not good at all due to my eyesight was not focused on the class. It is difficult to perform a dance using all the opposite cues instructing to mirror the class, I guess that will simply come with practice. The class broke into groups and practiced being strikers and dancers, and the fun part about this lesson was the MUSIC! They got a feel for the style music that is used for traditional tinikling, but it can be modified towards the hip hop category. My idea is to possibly have the students choose a song to perform a tinikling routine next time!

TINIKLING - Day 1

Well Lab C has begun, everyone is ready with their professional attire and watches on the wrist, and ready to teach international games! Maria and I decided to use Tinikling, an art of dance from the Philippines. It has a very catchy beat to it provided with two bamboo sticks and simple footwork. For my seven minutes of the lesson, I focused on the beat, using the cues "Together, beat beat, 1, beat beat, 2, beat beat, etc". We are not using the sticks yet, but the collective sound of the group by using their hands and kneeling on the floor was very good. It is very similar to our "We will we will TEACH YOU" beat, which I noticed towards the end of the lesson. I then divided the group in half into strikers and dancers, the strikers are responsible for the beat, while the dancers were responsible for the footwork. I placed each group on opposite sides and was able to see if the dancers could keep up with the 10 beats of the strikers. It was difficult at first, but once we had a leader to the beat, it went smoothly. The last part of the lesson I had 2 people from each group (strikers and dancers) team up together and practice. I set each group up the exact way they would look in a Tinikling routine, just without the sticks. Once each group practiced and got a chance to be a striker and a dancer, it was time to wrap things up and keep the anticipation going for next class! Overall, I feel Maria and I did a great job for the first part of this lesson due to we just learned it as well!

Here is an example of Tinikling:

We Will We Will TEACH YOU!

Last Friday, October 10th was the mini conference here at Cortland! It was a very interesting day, but by far the best part was done by Professor Yangs` 255 classes, opening up the day with a fun beat and saying. I somewhat feel responsible for this action for blurting out in class about the beat of Queen - We Will Rock You, simply taking the beat and words and changing them just a tad! After entering the gym with that introduction, I was very excited for the day! It actually was a wake up call a little bit of where I am in my major right now and the importance of a day like the mini conference is. I was there all morning for the opening speech with Dr. Pass and his amazing experience he shared with us. Then I attended a Polar workshop, it was interesting information, yet I felt like I was listening to a car salesman. The presenter was more focused on his product then the information we would obtain from it to make us better teachers. The next session I attended was the Leadership in PE, which was definitely interesting to be sitting in a room with professors, elementary PE teachers, high school PE teachers and fellow classmates. They stressed the importance on making a mark in your school's PE program, because it is not just the high schools fault for bad PE, PE needs to be vital to the students` lives beginning at a very early age. They spoke of possible plans to begin a curriculum at the elementary level that would carry all the way to high school. The presenter brought up the term "UBUNTU", which coincidentally is our key theme to our 2009 Cortland Softball Season. The meaning of this word generally means, "I AM because YOU ARE", it shows the importance of teamwork and how each individual of a team must be all they can be, but that isn't possible unless collectively everyone has the mentality of working together. It is a rare word, but very important and has a lot of meaning to me right now through my dedication to my team, but I can certainly use once in the teaching field. Overall, the mini conference was a great experience and definitely opened my eyes to the future of my PE career!

Frisbee Feedback Analysis

For our ultimate Frisbee unit, I was the first to go! I was a little nervous to start the whole unit, but my lesson was very basic. I taught the backhand throw of a frisbee, I definitely had great cues, but my feedback portion was not good at all. My feedback analysis was very weak and certainly did not meet the requirements to even get half the class. I only gave Chris feedback twice and thats it. I volunteered in the classroom for my teaching recording to be played, it was a tad embarrassing to only have one student down on the sheet for feedback, but I definitely learned from it and realized I was one of the first to go and accepted my mistake. For future lessons, I will certainly provide feedback to more than half the class (if time allows).

Welcome to 255 Olympics -- Teaching with Casey!

Towards the end of September, Casey and I volunteered to teach. We chose a themed event which was the Olympics, due to the Olympics just ending. We had three stations set up -- Scooter Swimming, Double Dutch and the Long Jump. Casey did a great introduction and I did the demonstration part, while then everyone dispersed to each station and switched after 2 minutes. We went around to each station providing feedback to everyone, and all the students seemed to enjoy the activity. I feel Casey and I did a good job working together, but since then we have definitely improved on our skills by using the proper teaching criteria.

Day One -- Volleyball Bump

The first day of classes is always exciting, many think classes are going to be very short and just have papers handed out, not in 255! We jumped right into teaching lessons to our peers, I enjoyed getting right to the point to give a feel for what the semester is going to be like. My partner Maria and I used the volleyballs to teach a volleyball bump. After practicing how to approach teaching our peers the skill, it was our turn to go. The introduction went smoothly, we both had loud and clear voices. Although another group had already taught the skill, we tried to use different aspects of it. After demonstrating how to hold your hands and direct the ball, the class split up and practiced with a partner. I made sure to challenge the class to see how long they could keep up the volleyball with their partner and to keep count of it! It was a short lesson, for the the whole class was teaching as well, so the closure was very basic by checking for understanding and getting the class involved with the game of volleyball. I look forward to using different materials and ideas for more teaching!