Physical Education teacher candidates utilize assessments and reflection to foster student learning and inform instructional decisions.
EDU 355 Reflection Journal
Day 1 2/22/10
1. What happened during the lesson that excited you or concerned you. What did you learn from your observation and experience?
This was my first time visiting Cayuga Heights Elementary School and it was a very fun day. The first class that I observed is a kindergarten class where Mr. Chase is the teacher the unit is volleyball. The class started out with a tag game where three students are the taggers and each one has a green, blue or red foam disc. If you are tagged by the blue disc you must make a bridge, red the student must perform three rocket jumps and green the student must stand like a tree. The green and blue students that are tagged are freed if a student crawls under the bridge or runs around the tree twice. After the tag game the students were broken into two groups on each side of the small volleyball net. The students played with beach balls and foam balls and practiced hitting the balls back and forth over the net. There were a lot of beach and foam balls being used and students hit the balls back and forth at their own pace. After this activity the class was almost over and the teacher used a cool down activity. The teacher called the game the stampede where the students had to lay down as still and as quiet as possible. The teacher let them lay for 3 minutes then one by one starting telling the most still and quiet students to line up. This got me excited because I realized how much children use their imagination. Also this is a great tactic to get the students to calm down before they go back to the classroom. This made me really understand how the classroom and physical education teachers work together because no classroom teacher wants a room full of hyped up students. This stampede game was a great way to calm the students down and line them up after the physical education class.
2. What did you learn about these students in all three domains?
This is my first time with Mr. Dumont and the First grade physical education class and the unit is bowling. The class started off with the same tag game that was played in Mr. Chase’s kindergarten class. Mr. Dumont switched up the locomotor skills a lot because the students get tired quickly if the students are told to run. I was very impressed with the locomotor skills of the class. The students could skip, gallop, slide, hop and run very well. Also I was impressed that the students never mixed up the gallop and the skip which most younger students do, but this class always knew what skill to perform. After the tag game the students practiced bowling. The students were broken up in 5 even lines and rolled a bouncy fake bowling ball at 5 plastic pins. The student who rolled would walk pick up the bowling pins and go to the end of the line. The students got two rolls to try to knock down the pins which was good because mostly everyone would knock all of them over. At this age I saw most students get excited when their classmates knocked over all the pins, but I also could pick out a select few who wanted to do better than their classmates. The students who wanted to better would boast about knocking down the pins while a majority of the class would get excited if anyone knocked over the pins. Overall I thought the students were good in the psychomotor, cognitive and assessment domains even though a select few were getting very competitive.
This artifact shows that I am a reflective teacher which is very important because teachers always have room to improve.
