Friday, November 26, 2010

NYS AHPERD Conference

This was my second time at the NYS conference. I definitely think that I took a lot more out of this conference than last years conference. I think the reason for this may be that I am a sophomore this year and defintiely more into the major now. I was so excited to go to the conference and learn more about my future profession and I definitely can apply more of what I learned at the conference to my experiences here at cortland now. For example, I learned many games that i learned can be appropirately adapted to teach at St.Mary's. I would like to share a little about a few of the different presentations I went to.

- "So you think you can Dance?"....... This presentation was so much fun! I think that rhythms and dance was definitely my favorite activity class at Cortland so far so I thought that it would be fun to take a dance class and discover some new dances to teach my future students one day. The women who gave this presentation was absolutley hysterical and I definitely had a lot of fun dancing!

- "See it, Believe it, Teach it: Sport Stacking with Speed Stacks!"....This presentation was all about using the newly popular cup stacking activity in a PE setting. It was interesting to see see how the speed stacking was used. For example, the presentor had us speed stack a pattern with the cups and then we had to do 10 jumping jacks, and then we did a different speed stacking pattern and had to do 10 push ups and so on. She also showed us a way to do a speed stacking tag game.


this is a picture of some of my friends doing a speed stacking tag game!


- "Shake your Sol: A learn to groove, hip-hop journey!"........This presentation was awesome and a ton of fun! We learned a lot of basic hip hop moves and put them all together in one big routine! It was challenging and a lot of fun at the same time! I definitely think that it would be a lot of fun to teach some hip hop choreography when doing a dance unit with my students in the future!

- I defintiely think it is important to mention the keynote speaker at this years conference. His name was Dr. John Pelizza and he is currently a professor at Sage University. I really enjoyed what he had to say about making changes in ones life and managing stress.

- "What's in your WALLET? (winning activities learners love every time)"......This was a very helpful presentation because I learned many different games that I can most definitely use one day in my physical education classes.

- "Zumbatomic"........This was probably my favorite presentation that I went to over the three days at the conference. We danced zumba for the entire time and it was so much fun! I was sweating and getting such a good workout and having a blast at the same time. I definitely would like to start taking the zumba classes at teh gym and maybe even get certified to be a zumba instructor one day!


I defintely took a lot from this years conference and am already looking foward to learning so much more again next year. It was also really cool to get to know some of the other physical education majors from Cortland as well as some of the alumni!
this is a picture of myself and the other APEM officers at the JB Nash awards dinner :)

Sunday, November 21, 2010

St. Mary's Bazar!!

Yesterday I helped out at the St.Mary's Holiday Bazar. It was definitely a great way to get involved in the community here in Cortland.  I was put in charge of running a couple of different games. One of the games was a ring toss type game. The children had to stand behind a line and toss a ring around one of four scare-crows. They received one red ticket for each ring that they got around a scarecrow. These red tickets could be used to get prizes! The other game I ran was a race car game board game. This was a game that involved 2-4 players. They would take turns rolling a big die and whatever number they landed on was the number of spaces they had to move. Whoever got to the finish line first was the winner and received some red tickets. Some of the different prizes they could chose to "buy" with their red tickets were silly bandz, stuffed animals, and candy!


this is a photo of me playing the scare-crow ring toss with a young girl!

I saw a lot of the student I have been working with in lab on Mondays at the bazar. I was really surprised to see how many students remembered who I was! A few of them came over to me to give me hugs when they saw me. One of the girls painted hearts andd flowers on my hands at the face painting station. All of the kids were were so excited to play the games I was running! It was also really awesome to see that the woman in charge of the bazar seemed very excited to have me and few of my peers there to help. I think that it is important that as future physical educators we get involved with activities in the community!


Saturday, November 20, 2010

Gobble Gobble! It's Thanksgiving at St.Mary's!




The theme of our lab this week was Thanksgiving! Although we did not dress up the kids knew very well that the theme was thanksgiving because we all brought colorful and exciting props for our games. My lab group was in charge of teaching the opening gym games. To get the kids warmed up and moving, Steve did a quick game of pilgrim tag. We had 29 kids in our group and it definitely was a lot to handle! The kids were full of energy and enthusiasm which definitely radiated to me when it came time for me to teach my game. The name of my game was the "turkey trot" and was done to to observe the locomotor skill of kicking. Before the lab I made colorful poster boards with different thanksgiving clipart pictures. The game involved the students kicking the ball to the poster and person across from them and then running to the poster where they just kicked the ball. I added in some different fun variations. For example, they had to gobble like a turkey when running to the next poster, or they had to make the sound of an Indian. Overall I think the game went well. There was definitely alot of kids and it felt like I was screaming in order for all of them to hear me. I definitely think that using music works really well to cue stopping and stopping for the kids and capture their attention. After my game, Andrew did a game that involved dribbling. His game also went very well and I really believe that my lab partners and I have come a long way since Week 1. After the opening gym games, the children went outside and we played a big game of kickball which was a lot of fun! At the end of the afternoon, we played one final game and then did the turkey pokey! The turkey pokey was really cute and the students really seemed to enjoy it. I would have to say that this was probably our best lab yet! I am looking foward to our next and final lab!