Round 2

Today we are back for round two at St. Mary's. For this lab I observed student A and student B who are both in the kindergarten at St. Mary’s. Student A is a 5 year old boy, and student B is a 5 year old girl. I observed them both playing the same game and evaluated their skill levels. The first skill I observed was how they ran. Both these students could ran with their arms in opposition to legs, elbow bent, ran with both feet off the ground for a brief period, and their foot placement was near or on line. Student B's nonsupport leg was bent at approximately 90 degrees where student A's was not. When they started to gallop, they both were able to lead with the right and left foot, had brief period where both feet are off the ground, and could step forward with leading foot followed by the trailing foot. As of now both students showed that they had a good understanding of how to run and gallop. As they started hopping, I noticed that student A couldn’t hop at all. His arms were all over and he could not hop on one foot. Meanwhile, student B mastered every component of the hop. I don’t think student A's inability to hop has to do anything with his age or gender, I just think someone needs to take the time to show him how to do it correctly. One of the teaching strategies that I observed were showing the students how to gallop and hop through playing a game. They were shown to students in the Pre K. They were taught by the Cortland students who demonstrated a proper gallop and hop. The effect was that all Pre-K students paraded around the gym galloping and hoping. This strategy was effective for the students that knew how to properly hop and gallop, but for the others who didn’t know how to properly hop or gallop it was not. Another strategy they could have used was to take the kids that couldn’t hop or gallop out of the game and show them step-by-step how to gallop and hop. The past two labs have been a lot of fun and I'm really looking forward to coming back next week!