Lab 4: The Circus Is In Town!

November 4th at St Mary's, the theme for Lab 4 was the circus. In honor of this theme, many of us students dressed up in clown appearances. My group started off in the cafeteria with the 3rd graders. It was very interesting to spend time with these kids as they were a lot more social than the younger kids. I was surprised how mature they were as well, because my little brother is the same age and he is off the wall constantly. These kids were great as we played checkers, cards, and lego type activities.
After playing in the cafeteria, everyone came up to the gym for game time. Unfortunately, my group was missing two people, but the teaching assistants helped out by participating with the kids. The space was restricted and made organizing the game more challenging. Looking at the game, we needed to choose something that involved overhand throwing. I chose a game called "Guard The Castle". One person needs to throw the ball to hit the cone while the other person is trying to protect it. With the limited space, we just had everyone throw and block in a straight line. At first some of the kids were not too aggresive about, whom were mainly the girls. They were throwing the ball underhanded and were not coming close to the cone. I stopped them to show how to throw overhanded and they immediately improved there aim. A couple of the kids actually hit the cone after I showed them. We eventually moved on to a variety of tag games like freeze and blob tag. They had a lot of energy to do this and had fun in the process. We closed out the day doing the chicken dance with everyone in a circle, but unfortunately the music was not loud enough. We all chimed in the melody while we did the dance.

The next morning I went back to St Mary's to observe Mrs Garcia's pre-k class for over an hour. The first 45 minutes was just free time for everyone in which I played with everyone on the rug area. It started off with just me passing a foam hockey puck back and forth with C and Z. They reacted excited when I quickly stopped it with my foot a few times. When more kids arrived, we resorted to the building blocks and built gates for people to sit in. Mrs Garcia eventually announced that it was clean time and thus the timer began to see if everyone cleaned up in time. I helped out and tried motivating the kids but they were too late. Once finished, everyone went to their spots on the rug and began their "good morning" song. After completing their intro to the day, they lined up for the bathroom. I noticed that Mrs Garcia enforced bathroom rules by asking a question they presumably get asked everytime. They all respond each time thus helps them follow the rules. It was time for Spanish lessons once the children arrived back into the room. All of the kids recieved a name tag that included a completely different hispanic name, which I found to be a bit strange. The Spanish teacher played a fishing game in which they hooked up an object and had to state what it's name is in Spanish. This made the vocabulary a lot more fun for them. At this time I had to leave and D then initiated a hug on me. This then caused everyone else in the class to give me a hug. I would love to go back in the class and observe a whole day to see how it goes.