Tuesday, November 17, 2009
So Lab C was the next teaching trial this semester. For this class Mike and I decided to teach everyone how to play a little cricket. Cricket is one of England's oldest national games that has been played for a few hundred years already. Since noone has really been introduced to the game of cricket on a frequent basis, we started off with the very basics. These were the fundamentals of Bowling(which is the equivalent to a pitch in baseball) and hitting which has many different techniques then a regular swing in baseball.
The first big step was getting acquainted with the game ourselves. This wasn't a very tough thing to do because the basic parts of the game are easy to pick up but when you start getting into the more specific rules, it gets tough because there are so many new thigns to learn. My part of the lesson was the techniques for bowling. I could easily relate and pick up what the fundamentals are because I have been playing baseball for almost my whole life and could pick up on how to do certain things quickly. The bowl in cricket requires the bowler to take a sprinting head start, take a crow hop, and throw the ball with a straight arm bouncing it in front of the wickets trying to knock them off. There are so many drills that you can do to introduce this skill to students.
Starting off my lesson with a quick game of chuck the chicken is one of my personal favorite things to do. This game keeps everyone active and has everyone paying attention and getting physical activity in. It also appeals to everyone because a rubber chicken is involved which makes things more fun. The first drill to start everyone off with is pairing upi and practicing the arm position when bowling. This skill needs to be worked on the most because everyone naturally wants to bend their arm when they throw so it will be the hardest to do on a consistent basis. The other drill I had everyone doing is approaching a target, which was a bowling pin, andd practicing the throw. I had cones set up as a lane for guidance so everyone stayed in a straight line so they didn't drift while throwing and they could get the hang of what an approach is like. I think this drill is the best one to do when teaching a bowl. You can easily progress through all of the aprts of the throw during this drill because the cones give good guidance to stay running straight through your bowl. It can be done walking as we did, or you can have them take a 1/2 speed running approach or a full speed approach.
After watching everyone elses lessons I knew that there would be some sort of behavioral problem I would have to deal with. The first one was Pat and Amy posing as a couple who wanted to be with each other during drills. I caught this and asked them to keep practicing but as I found out afterwards, I left them doing the drill next to each other which did not completely fix the problem. At the end of my lesson 2 guys started fighting over something and I quickly had to go get them to seperate and stop the problem. But as I was going after these two boys Pat and Amy decided to take a walk to the corner of the gym with each other. This was a great example of how you can get distracted by one problem and let your guard down thinking that some other problem won't occur at that moment which happened in this case. As a teacher your really going to have to keep your eyes open at every second even if your trying to fix something.
Overall I feel this lab went very smoothly. It is really getting easier and more automatic on how to teach a lesson. Each one that goes by gives more insight on what to look out for and what you need to do when each little problem comes around. Next test is Lab D. Hopefully this one goes according to plan and I can do my best lesson yet.
And Since I haven't posted in a while, Yankees = World Champs!!