Thursday, April 29, 2010

End of the Semester

A video recapping the semester:

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Lab D: Time to Dance!


Lab D was the last of my lessons for EDU 255 and I feel that I have made a great improvement as a teacher since day 1 of the class. My lesson focus was on dancing. I chose to teach the dance to the chorus of "Bad Romance" by Lady Gaga. I felt this would be fun to teach as she is currently one of today's biggest pop stars, which would intrigue people in the classroom. Connecting to students' interest certainly do increase the energy level in the classroom and I believe I succeeded in doing so. Take a look at my Lesson Plan for further information on the lesson.
Going into the lesson, I knew that I needed to give feedback to the majority of the students. I was able to give almost everyone in the class feedback, which is definitely something I struggled with in earlier lessons. Also, I made sure I gave the majority of the people congruent feedback, since that is the way for students to gain success. An exact layout of who I gave feedback to can be see in my Feedback Analysis. There were two problems with this. First, I have trouble keeping my eyes on the entire class while I am helping students out. I find it hard to focus on giving someone improvements to the given task and look out for troublemakers at the same time. This is a skill that I definitely need to acquire. Another problem with me giving feedback is that it takes a long time for me to get to everyone. This leaves the people who can do the task to become bored and begin to stop. Challenges would have solved this problems and unfortunately I forgot to use them. You can see the lack of challenges in my content development.
There was a big time issue with my lesson. I was going according to plan, but the lesson before me started late and ended late. Once the official class time was coming to an end, I was told that I only had a minute. I started to panic and pretty much skip to the end just so I could get to the finale of the lesson. Luckily my professor allowed me to have extra time to complete my lesson and all of my classmates were willing to stay as well. Regardless, I still had good time management, unlike almost all of my previous lessons. In addition to that, my Time Coding has improved immensely. I had over 60% of activity time. This is very important for a physical education class as you want your students to be moving consistently.
As much as I have improvement since the beginning of the semester, there will always be more need of improvement. I tend to slip up my wording often when I am giving instructions to the class. I believe this will decrease when I become more proficient in the subject areas. Knowing what and how I will be teaching the class is always the challenge, but I know I will overcome this challenge before going into my student teaching.





Saturday, April 3, 2010

Leadership hours.....the beginning


During my Spring Break, I was able to volunteer at my church to acquire leadership hours. This included the Friday night youth program called Awana and two sessions of Sunday school. The total hours I received added up to be 5 hours.
March 12th was the day I helped at Awana. Normally the kids are split up according to grade level, but this was a special day with some presenters. The beginning and end comprised of me keeping control of a group of kids in the pews. At one point the children engaged in a few games, one of which was rock, paper, scissors tag. I participated along and helped those who were having trouble figuring out what they were supposed to do. The evening lasted around 3 hours.
On March 14th and 21st, I assisted in leading the 1st-4th grade class. The class consisted of stories, lessons, craft activities, and a video. All in
which I helped with. Taking these opportunities have definitely helped improved my role as a leader. Leading and maintaining the children is something that I will have to do as a physical educator. Each class lasted for an hour, bringing my total hours so far to 5.