Locomotor Lab Part A

There is a very wide variety of the abilities that the students at St. Mary’s have with their locomotor movements. All of the students are able to run with pretty mature ability, but their abilities to gallop and hop were not very good. I think that their ability to perform these tasks weren’t as great because they do not have to do them as often as they run. It is obvious that doing something repetitively makes it easier to do. The same goes for learning different subject materials in school, and also all the different sports that there are.

My class observed two children while we were at St. Mary’s. They are both six and in kindergarden. The only difference between them is that one is a male and the other is a female. With their running abilities I saw that both of them seemed to be mature. The other two abilities that I was observing them on, the gallop and the hop, were not as good. I realized that they were not the only students struggling with this though, the rest of the students at the school were having trouble as well. The boy was definitely a little bit more developed in the gallop than the girl was was, but I think that from what I saw they are still in the initial stage. The boy also seemed to have more ability to perform the last locomotor movement that we had them perform, the hop.

Many of the people in my class first explained the activity that everyone was going to do and then from there they let the students perform the task. I did not see that they were correcting the students if they were not doing any of the tasks wrong, but instead let the students perform it as they thought that they should. I think that this was very good for the kids because they are able to develop the tasks at their own rate, and can observe the kids around them to see if they are doing the activity correctly. This also helped us because we were better able to observe the two kids to evaluate where they stood with their ability without someone helping them to improve first.

Another thing that everyone in the class did really well was being happy and cheerful. With this I noticed that all the kids were happier to be there and really wanted to participate in the games. I noticed that some of the students were better able to perform the tasks that they were assigned, such as hopping and galloping, because they were more excited about participating.

I think that one of the main things that was more effective with teaching was when there were materials used for the games. One of the groups had the kids bring balls back to their hula hoops and another had the kids running around trying to capture the other kids “flags.” I noticed that by using these things the kids were more excited and became more active in the game.

A large part of interacting with these kids is being excited to be there. Our class is at the end of the school day, so it is sometimes very hard to muster up the energy to be cheerful and bubbly around the kids. In spite of this, it is definitely something that has to be done in order to keep their attention and I think that we do a really good job of having a high level of energy for the children.