Lab 3

       Lab 3 was a blast!  The theme for the lab was Sports, and a lot of the college students participated in the theme which was awesome.  I wore my Cristiano Ronaldo Portugal Soccer jersey which caught the eye of one student who likes soccer.  He came up to me and said, "even though I don't like Ronaldo, I still really like your shirt".  I thought it was nice of him to say and also got me to find something that I had in common with him which was an interest in soccer, so myself and another student talked to him for a little bit about soccer.  My group created the games so that our peers could assess the other students based on the skills they were to observe.  Ryan had a cool game where the kids had to get bean bags and then put them in the hoola hoop.  My team was the yellow hoola hoop and we did pretty good.  One thing that I tried implementing to them was counting, so I told them after every time we are going to count them to see if we beat the other teams.  My game was called Alligator Alley which revolved around the idea of the kids being in a swamp surrounded by alligators, where they had to leap or jump from rock to rock (polyspot).  If they didn't land on one, they could be tagged by an alligator (student with a green noodle).  If they got caught, they had to stay still on a rock for 5 seconds.  Two of the skills were leap and jump so I thought this was a good game for my peers to assess the kids on.

           After all the games, my group went downstairs where the kids had snack.  I found it funny when one kid started dunking his pretzels in milk.  It caught the attention of my TA Eric who thought it was funny.  Since he thought it was funny, it caught the attention of a little girl who then wanted to see if it tasted good, so she started doing it ha!  While we were down there we talked a lot about each others pets.  I learned one girl had 3 dogs and she told me a little about them, and another student had one dog, but he didn't like it.  All in all it was a good lab and I'm looking forward to Lab 4 with the Pre-K students!

My Lab 3 write up

Coach Herman Boone

             The movie "Remember the Titans" revolves around a school in Alexandria, Virginia that had to integrate the black and white students.  The Titans were the football team of T.C. Williams High School which at the beginning of the school year fired long time and successful (white) Bill Yoast, and hired Herman Boone, who was a black coach from North Carolina.  This brought up even more controversy then just the schools being integrated because many of the white players were upset that their coach had his job taken from him.  Because of this many of them said they would not play, causing Coach Yoast to become an assistant coach to Coach Boone, instead of taking another job.  The team had to overcome adversity because the black and white players did not get along.  It wasn't until Coach Boone took them to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania where they went through a gruesome camp that helped unite them in the end.  Coach Boone did things such as having a white and black player room together. (Link to Coach Boone's Speech from Remember the Titans)  He also made each player find out certain information about the others so they could get know more about each other.  By the end of camp, both sides had reconciled their differences and realized that winning to them was more imporant than race.

                  Coach Boone came to SUNY Cortland and gave a speech about the movie, adversity, and the philosophies he believed then entailed being a successful coach.   Being an aspiring coach and a huge fan of the movie, when I first heard this I was so excited and pumped to go to this event.  I learned a lot from what he said and definitely will remember things he said in the future when I become a coach.  He had to overcome being a black coach in a pressurized white society.  He overcame adversity by uniting his multi-raced team and proving to the community that he was worthy of being head coach and that he knew what it truly meant to be a coach.  After his speech, students were allowed to come up and take pictures and get autographs with Coach Boone.  Of course I could not turn down this offer.  As a big fan of the movie I remember in the movie the play he calls at the end to win the championship game: "Fake 23 blast, with a backside George reverse".  So when I went up to shake his hand and get a picture with him, I asked him if that was the real play.  He said yes it was, and then drew it up for me, explained it, and signed it!  I was so pumped and excited that I called multiple people and bragged about it.  After a reporter saw what he had done for me and interviewed me about it. (Click link to read Cortland Standard's story with my interview at the end)  This was a definitely an experience I will never forget!

SUNY Cortland PE Mini Conference/Leadership Conference

SUNY Cortland just recently held a New York State Association for Health Physical Education Recreation and Dance () mini conference where dozens of presenters, teachers, professors, and students from the central New York state area got together and attended or presented sessions that revolved around the theme of "How Exercise, Learning, and the Brain can Transform Teaching from the Inside Out".  While attendees waited in the gym for the keynote speaker Dr. Sarah Armstrong, many SUNY Cortland students and myself performed a flash mob titled "Cortland Rock", retitling the song by LMFAO "Party Rock".  Click the link to see the video!!    ( Link to Cortland Rock PE Flash Mob video )  Besides listening to the keynote speaker and performing in the flash mob, I attended three sessions.  The first session I attended was called "Active Health", which was a session taught by SUNY Cortland Professor Helena Baert.  The concept of this class was to incorporate healthy life skills into games which teachers could use to help their students learn more about healthy life skills such as proper dieting, hygiene, and exercise.  One of the games I liked was called plaque attack which was a form of tag where if you got tagged, you had to have one person who was a toothbrush and one person who was toothpaste come to you and then you were OK to play again.  I liked this session a lot because when I become a teacher, I want to incorporate more into my lessons about eating and living healthier and being more aware and educated about health.  The second session I attended was at the Exergame Lab run by SUNY Cortland Professor Stephen Yang.  I had a lot of fun at this lab.  The idea of this was to incorporate fitness into video games.  As many people know, a lot of kids do not get very good exercise, and sitting in front of the television playing video games doesn't help.  One area that has increased in video games however is health and fitness games for video games.  One game that I liked was a biking game where a stationary bike was connected to a Playstation where you controlled the speed of a car by how fast you pedaled the bike, and you steered the car with the handlebars.  Another cool game I liked involved steps that you had to walk on in order to play the Xbox 360 NBA video game.  It made you constantly move your feet while you were playing.  By the end of all the games I played I was sweating bullets!  The third session I went to involved Ipads and other Apple products and how you can find different apps to help with teaching and health.  Some of the cool apps I liked involved calorie counters, different muscle workouts, and a voice recorder that could record what you say and then type it.  All in all it was a great conference I thought and can't wait for the next one!
                         After that conference, I attended the SUNY Cortland Student Leadership Conference.  There I met multiple former and current PE teachers who gave presentations on different areas of leadership and how to help make yourself better in regards to teaching and leading others.  One of the sessions I really enjoyed was performed by former PE teacher John Smith.  He taught us several simple games that can be done to help kids with their flexibility, coordination, and teamwork.  I attended the workshop because I have always been a leader, and as a leader I feel as though you can always improve to make yourself better, which then in return can help improve others.  This I feel should be a philosophy of all teachers.  I would like to become an orientation leader here at SUNY Cortland during the summer and I feel as though this definitely helped me.  Also in regards to that, I am an aspiring coach and I believe as a successful coach you not only have to be a leader on the field, but off the field too.  By attending this conference I learned how to improve myself as a coach off the field because a lot of my philosophies as a coach in years to come are going to be not only teaching my students and players how to kick a soccer ball, or shoot a slap shot, but how to become better people in general, and hopefully one day might say, "Mr. Henrie really helped me out a lot these past years.  I learned a lot about life and how to persevere because of him."  This is one of my goals as a teacher, and hearing words like these will make it all worth while and be one of the biggest reasons why I chose a profession like this.

Lab 2

          Lab 2 was a lot of fun, full of interesting and exciting events that I was not expecting.  In the beginning of class I had to observe some of the younger kids and how they ran, galloped, and hopped.  Some of my peers came up with fun little games where they incorporated that they had to do these types of things and then we would analyze them and see how well they did each of them.  We each had a boy and a girl we had to assess, and with that I marked down whether he/she was doing good in that category, average, or needed some work.  After that my group went outside where we played with the older kids.  They had a big game of tag going which I joined in on.  We played for a little while then another kid decided he wanted to join in however for some reason tagged another person so it got a little confusing and there were two people it instead of just one.  This I thought was funny because even though they noticed something was wrong and would say it, they still kept playing.  After playing tag we went into the gym and I introduced my game to the kids. 

         Since the theme of the week was "Friendship'" I chose a game I called Chain Tag where you were only safe if you chained your arm with your partner, thus trying to incorporate friendship.  If you got tagged, you had to sit down and then someone could get you back in if they tagged your hand.  So I thought this was a good idea because you get a partner which could symbolize friendship, and if you thought you were going to get caught then you could find your partner and try to chain yourselves before you got caught.  This game turned out pretty good, it seemed as though all the kids liked it.  I was surprised because I noticed the last time I was there that there were two kids who didn't really like playing that much, however, they participated in my game which surprised me and made me happy.  After my games the rest of my group introduced their games and we played them as well.  At the end we had all the groups and kids get together and we did the Chicken Dance.  I hadn't done it in a while but it was like riding a bike, once you learn how you don't forget.

 Lab 2

Are games like Dodgeball acceptable in PE?

For many of us, we grew up playing the classic games like dodge ball and kickball in our PE classes and during recess.  I remember in Junior High one of the most liked activities played by boys and girls was 10 base kickball which was where my teacher set up six mats around the perimeter of the gym, and before you could go home you would have to have been to ten bases.  All the other rules of kickball applied as well.  Dodge ball was always fun as well.  There were always different versions that could be used to modify it a little bit, however you still needed the same skills in order to succeed in each one.  These activities can be fun, however, do they teach kids how to be physically educated?  How do you assess them in these games?  How do you set up lesson plans in order to teach these games?  Those are all questions I would ask because I don't feel as though they are acceptable in Physical Education.  For example, in basketball you could teach dribbling skills, shooting skills, passing skills, and rules regarding the game.
                   
With dodge ball however I feel as though it would be harder because the only skills are throwing and catching a round ball.  Also, the rules are that you either catch the ball or avoid it if you are being attacked, or you throw the ball at your opponent.  With that being said, you can basically teach the game of dodge ball in less than five minutes.  How do you assess someone in this circumstance?  If they make it to the last five left they pass?  If they can correctly catch the ball?  Sounds a little bit too hard for me.  On the contrast, in basketball you could see if they were shooting right by looking at where there hands were and how they followed through for example.  The only way I could see myself allowing games like these to be played was if I had a substitute and the lesson I was teaching was too tough for them.  However, I feel as though I could come up with a better list of activities for a substitute in which my students would be getting better physically educated and maybe not sitting "out" or on the sideline, instead of constantly being involved.

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Fundamental Skills, Assessment, and Health

Fundamental skill development and assessment are very important to Physical Education.  Many schools in the past have viewed Physical Education, or what I like to call a lazy version of PE "gym class" as a chance for teachers to take a break from their students, and often devote some of their time to lesson planning while their students can run around and play for a little bit.  Even as a child, I viewed gym class, and I'm calling it gym class because that's what I viewed it as then and now, because I saw it as a second recess because we literally didn't learn any skills or develop anything.  We simply played games such as tag, soccer, basketball, etc.  Those are things I played at recess as well.  We had competitions as well, however, how can you assess a competition necessarily.  Just because one person may win does not necessarily mean that they are physically educated.  That is why there are national standards which are put into place, so that students can be assessed based on how much they know about being physically educated.  One organization is NASPE, or National Association for Sport and Physical Education.  They created the National Standards for Physical Education which was designed to provide guidance for teachers who are trying to physically educate students (www.aahperd.org/naspe)  By having national standards, this then makes it easier for teachers to create curriculums and benchmarks so that students will know so much information by a certain time.  One way that this is done is on a scale from 1-4, 4 being the highest.  If the student meets all the requirements of a certain skill then they receive a 4. For example if the task is to properly serve a tennis ball, the key elements may be that they throw the ball high enough, put the racket in the back scratch position, hit the ball with their arm fully extended, and hit the ball 5 out of ten times in the volley zone, then they get a four.  If they most of them and can use a little improvement they might get a 3.  If they need help and can only do a couple of those elements then they may get a two.  If they get a one then they need to practice a lot more and are no where close.

                                                        
Because of all of this, it is important to start young and by having these National Standards we can do so.  Health is a big issue, especially in this country where a good amount of our population is obese.  If students can be taught how to live a healthy lifestyle then we can decrease this national epidemic.  Many schools now have students create their own fitness plans so it helps students understand the importance of  health safety.  I feel as though through NASPE and other organizations that PE is headed in a great direction and students now are attending more PE classes and not "gym" classes so they are becoming more physically educated than students of the past.

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Lab 1

My observations for Lab 1