Fun at St. Mary's!

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Hall of Shame: Dodgeball

Dodge ball is a highly controversial game that is played in many physical education classes. Some would argue that it creates too much down time, some say that it promotes bullying, but others have no problem with it at all. There are many things you could do to make the game of dodge ball more friendly to all.

I personally feel that the only problem with dodge ball is the amount of downtime that is created when a player is eliminated. To increase physical activity and decrease down time I think some changes and variations can be made to the game. Once a player is knocked out give them multiple options they could do to get back into the game: 20 push-ups, make 10 lay-ups, run two laps around the gym or any other thing you think of. This would first decrease the down time as the students will always be doing some activity and it develops many other skills when they try to get back into the game. Also the game would never end so this reduces the self-esteem loss because no one would technically lose and targeting the weaker people would not be as beneficial anymore and I think more people would actually go for the stronger players since they could quickly get back into the game. I don't think any games should be put into the hall of shame, but put into an under construction category until they are more suitable for physical education class.

Day 1 at St. Mary's

Today was the first day that we had an official lab at St. Mary's and I was nervous going into because I wasn't sure what to expect. It was chaotic going into the gym and we found out that we only had half the gym to work with as older girls were playing basketball on the other half. The theme of this week was tag games so we started off playing different kinds of tag for the first bit. The kids then got divided into smaller numbers as certain grades were left in the gym and the others went into the cafeteria for snack time and games. My group stayed upstairs in the gym first and we had to gather the kids together for the next game which started to get chaotic with the smaller group. It seemed that whenever we got 3 kids to settle down, another 3 would get up and become off task, this made it hard to be organized and start a new game. We were able to get everyone on the same page eventually and continued games of tag including blob tag, frog tag, and various freeze tag types. Then my group went downstairs for snack time and small games and I watched a couple kids play checkers for awhile and then I helped one kid with a game because he was still learning the rules. One thing I noticed from observing the game of checkers is that some of the kids have a basic understanding of the rules, but it seems they are just on the borderline of fully understanding the game rules so maybe they haven't fully developed the skills for that yet. When this time was up we went back up to the gym and all the groups were then there and the kids weren't all organized and some were having a catch, some played basketball, and a couple were kicking a soccer ball. I saw one boy alone kicking a soccer ball so I went over to him and played numbers with him which is just juggling the soccer ball back and forth to see who can get the most. After playing that for awhile the time was up and we were done so all the other people in lab gathered up and we talked about the class before we were dismissed.