August 29th

Great way to start the day off...Hearing the song "Call Me Maybe" about 100 times. Many of the groups in the dance class are using that song, so we hear it over and over again for 70 minutes. It was awesome! Some of the students are working really hard at making up a dance while there is of course one or two who are "too cool." We went around checking the dances and they all had to have a majority of it done by the end of class. Next week is the last time they can practice and then they have to perform and get video taped.

Second session during basketball we did two more teaching strategies. We did rewarding and pump up. Mr.Finley took the lead on this lesson since he is teaching this is class and can relate more to what they already spoke about. I actually got to play today since I wasn't exactly teaching, and because a team was down a player. During the rewarding portion, Mr.Finley gave out chocolates called "Fantales" which are basically chocolate covered caramels. He picked one of the teams to reward to get their motivation up and kept giving them candy through out the game. The second portion was pumping the students up with music. We played songs like Eye of the Tiger to see if it would motivate the students more. What we observed was that the first 15 minutes everyone was really psyched and motivated, but it started to die out. But, the game play is SO much better than what it was. They played for 30 minutes with out stopping and the distraction of the music made it fly by and they didn't feel like they were playing for that long.

The rest of the day was free and a guest speaker came in to talk to the Rugby boys about psychology in sports. It was all about the emotions a player feels on the field at certain points and keeping a positive attitude. It was aimed to help athletes get up after "failing" and to mentally keep yourself up instead of "feeling like crap." It was interesting and I hope the boys will get something out of it and use it on the field.

Tomorrow I am off to Currimundi Special School and will be spending the day in the pool with all different students. I enjoyed the adapted lab section in the pool so hopefully this will be a great experience as well.