St. Mary's Labs...

Lab 5: During this lab, my group...Jumping Jack and the Thriving Five...was with the PRE K level. We started out by playing legos and helping them make different types of ships or planes with the legos. I love how this age group has such amazing imaginations. The fact that I get to go along with it makes it even better as well. After they had their snack, our group split up so half of us read story books, and the other half went into the gym to develop the game we were going to play with the kids when they came into the gym. We decided to set up stations in order to get the idea of the environment across. We had them crawl through the tunnel, jump in hoops, dribble a ball, etc. The stations allowed us to work on and observe various locomotor skills with the children instead of concentrating on just one. This activity worked out well because our group could split up between stations and work individually with the children at their station. I do find the PRE K level difficult to work with in some aspects though because it is hard to figure out how to walk the fine line between age appropriate, and too advanced for the children. I think my group did a good job finding the perfect balance and incorporating fun activities for the children to partipate in.

Lab 6: Our final Lab at St. Mary's was based on an Easter theme. My group was assigned to the cafeteria to play our activity so we decided to incorporate fine motor skills in order to give the children a break but still have fun. We did a spin off of pin the tail on the donkey and we made it into put your eggs in the basket. Each child colored their own egg, and once they were finished we but a blindfold on them and spun them around. Then we had them walk with bumpers up of course towards the poster with a big bucket on it. They then placed their egg on the bucket. This activity worked out great because the children were constantly going back for more eggs to color and then would come up and get some physical activity right after. After doing this for about a half hour we moved on to our final activity which was an egg on a spoon relay. We split up the group into 3 lines and had them walk with a plastic egg on a spoon down to a basket at the other end of the cafeteria, once they made it to the end of the cafeteria, they placed their egg in the basket and bunny hopped back to their line passing off the spoon. After they completed this section, we had they walk backwards to the basket, and then we had them hold two eggs. I think this activity was a great way to incorporate Easter into our games and also the kids really enjoyed it. Every kid gets excited about holidays, so why not try to take advantage of having the ability to use it as a theme?