Great Book on the Beneficial Effects of Exercise

I am reading a great book on exercise and the effects it has on the body and mind called Spark, by John Ratey. The beginning chapters are discussing the effects of exercise on students in the morning before classes begin in a program called "Zero Hour PE". I will certainly add more as I go on in the book, but so far the PE in the morning is really benefitting the students throughout the day!

Linking the blog and webpage...

Today I decided to link my PE blog to my webpage. I am excited to share more about physical education, the web design process, and interesting new things I am discovering.

Teaching Experience

This past weekend, I taught my first gymnastics lessons at the local YWCA. I found this to be a good opportunity for me to put all my previous instruction into practice and planned with lesson plans and the resources I have been provided with. Overall the lessons went well and I was very happy to have made the lesson plans. With out them I think I would have had a much tougher time. Management of the classes went fairly well, however, I am working on keeping students where they need to be. This weekend I am excited to know the students, be more familiar with ability levels, and to implement the lesson plans that better reflect their ability levels.
Teaching definately is a reflective experience and I feel much more prepared having adjusted and adapted lessons to the students personal abilities.

Intramural Sports

This semester, I was the captain of my intramural soccer team here at Cortland. When taking up the role I had no idea how much work went into it or the leadership it included. As captain the preparation (even for intramurals) went far beyond what I expected. My first task was discussing the availability of games for the season, and when everyone was free. At the beginning of the season I also had to help prepare my team by scheduling a meeting to coordinate uniforms, numbers, and names. After this I went to order the uniforms, pay for them after collecting everyone's money, and finally pick-up and distribute them. Making sure everyone was prepared was important because if we were ill-prepared we were not allowed to play. Before the first game, I realized I had to find a way to communicate with all the players to let them know we had a game. In previous years, previous captains had utilized a facebook group to notify of upcoming games. As an infrequent facebooker, I found it hard to keep up with checking and usually found out hours before the game from others on the team. As a result I decided that since everyone had a phone I would text message to make sure everyone could be there and decide whether or not we needed to cancel. The text message method worked out great and I knew every game how many people and who exactly would be attending the game.

Throughout the season we played 10 fifty games and competed in the championship final game. The games themselves were an absolute blast and every game I found myself providing teammates with feedback and providing motivation whenever it was needed. Making sure everyone played and participated was also important to the game, and as much as we all wanted to play the entire game, there came a time to sub out. After every game, we brought the younger girls home who did not have their car with them. Although we wound up losing the final game the season was great and it taught me a lot about preparation and motivation.

Yoga Unit and NASPE Standards

The yoga unit was a very rewarding and informative process, as I learned a lot about my strengths and weaknesses. So how does the yoga unit match up to the NASPE Standards and information to be placed in my professional portfolio? Lets find out...

Standard 1: Scientific and Theoretical knowledge

This standard states that the teacher will not only know the knowledge pertaining to the course, but will also be able to apply the concepts to the development of the student's physical education. For this standard, a task card was used displaying the cues to the cat pose. Upon reading the cues and looking at the picture students were to perform the pose and assess their peers. In the end of the lesson we all worked together to do the poses as one group.

Standard 2: Skill and Fitness Based Competence

Demonstrations are an important part of being a physical educator and having the skills and knowledge to competently move and enhance the fitness of others is vital. In the yoga unit, it was common that certain poses needed to be demonstrated for students. Here is a photo of the students getting into the mountain posture during the Sun Salutation A sequence.

Standard 3: Planning and Implementation

As a physical educator it is important to plan lessons based upon local, state, and national standards in addition to having the needs of students in mind. This lesson plan was in preparation for the yoga unit and follows the NYS and NASPE standards while keeping the safety and interests of students in mind.

Standard 4: Instructional Delivery and Management

It is important as a teacher to have effective communication skills in a varity of settings. This can include demos, explanations, cues and prompts for the lesson. For the yoga unit, the use of procedures and guidelines for the students to follow and keep in mind througout the lesson.

Standard 5: Impact on Student Learning

This standard discusses the need for teachers to have effective assessments for students to improve upon their learning. The assessments used in the yoga unit were in the form of a cooperation rubric for the group work and an effort rubric for the Sun Salutation A.

Standard 6: Professionalism

As a student, it is important that I show my readiness to become an effective teacher through my choice of activities, extra-curricular activities, my ethics, respect, and my belief that all students can become physically educated individuals. In the yoga unit, I utilized the group work so that students could work with one another to guide eachother through the process. By doing this no one was left behind and all students could readily participate in the activity and learn the various yoga poses.

Good Morning

Just practicing using the hyperlink option!

Lab D

This past Monday I completed the teaching portion of lab D with my final yoga lesson. For this lesson technology was incorporated through the use of a Youtube video displaying different partner yoga positions. Although the display was smaller than I would have liked the students were able to get the idea of the poses from the picture. Also, the sound it the big gym was lower than I would have liked so I wound up repeating what was said on the video. From this experience I learned that technology should be rehearsed and back-ups should be around to fall on if problems exist.
At the beginning of the lesson students were given different task cards with various yoga postures on each and played a game of tag utilizing these cards as instant activity. These cards were used to show students other poses that we may not necessarily get to go over and later were used to split the class into partners. The dividing of the class using these cards with partnered postured made the transition to the next activity easy and free from confusion. The problem I did encounter however, was an uneven number of students leaving one alone. As a result I worked with this student as much as possible but had trouble being ass attentive as I would have liked.
Overall the lesson went as planned, but I forgot to mention the cues for the partner poses and therefore had trouble checking for understanding at the close of my lesson. Next time I will have to print a paper to carry with cues and reminders for my lesson as forgetting important aspects seems to happen often when I teach.
As with the past lesson I have included my Feedback Analysis Form that shows how the feeback given in this lab is not much different than the last, and I can definately give the students way more feedback related to the focus of the lesson. The Lesson Plan was definately an improvement over the last one, yet somehow I to add my name! The Time Coding Form shows a definate improvement in how my time was used by increasing my activity time. The transcript shows an improvement also. I sound much more comfortable teaching the lesson, yet I still need to work on decreasing the number of "alrights" used in starting my sentences. In all this lesson was an improvement to the last and I hope to see further improvement.

For the end of Lab D all materials were put together from Lab C to create a packet on the country and unit taught. To find more out about my Yoga Unit and China see the Yoga A, Yoga B, and Yoga C componants of the packet.