Raquette Lake

Today I actually dropped a course that had me going to Raquette Lake in the Adirondacks for two weeks in August. Instead, I am going to the split session which should free up my summer schedule more and give me a winter experience as well. The split session has us go for about 5 days at the very end of August and than we go for a week in January. It should be really cool to go in winter time as that is my favorite time of the year to be in the mountains. There is more solitude and more of a risk reward factor. The mountains look gorgeous when they are snow capped and you are working through a forest and the trees are covered with snow. I like that Cortland offers a split session because it gives people a chance to experience this. A lot of people head indoors when winter hits but this will give them an opportunity to see the mountains and lakes in winter and also to learn important winter skills as well.

{Adirondack High Peaks in Winter - Taken from Giant Mountain}

Lab D Thoughts

In the upcoming weeks, I will have to do my final teaching for 255. This will be my lab D, the longest and most thorough of all the teachings yet. My teacher has put me in the pool and I am really unsure of what activity I am going to do in the pool. I want to branch out and do something different; I don't want to do swim strokes. If I do that I know the class is going to fall asleep. My teacher mentioned to me that I do something such as water polo which would be a really fun idea. I still want to present a game that is going to surprise everyone and have everyone active the entire time.

{http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:WaterPolo.JPG}

My teacher gave me this game called swinxs. Click on the link to check it out. I have a few ideas brewing in my head on what to use it for so I don't want to give anything away. I feel this device would be really cool for an instant activity. Time is running out for Lab D and I know I have gotten stronger with my teaching each lab so I definitely want to finish strong!

Motor Behavior Lab

In my motor behavior lab, we are learning a lot of really cool things and doing a lot of fun experiments. One of the cool things we did on thursday was working with goal setting and how it is shown to beneficial for performing and learning motor skills. We learned that research has shown that the most effective goals are those which are high, yet attainable. The task we were working with for the goal setting lab was speed stacking. I was excited to try that because it was a game I have never done.

For the lab, our teacher had us do a pre-test and it was timed so we would know what time we got. From there, he passed out slips of paper and told us what type of goal we had. There were 3 different goals: Hard , Medium, and Do Your Best. For hard, you took your pre-test time and multiplied it by .3 and that was your goal time you wanted to get. For medium, you multiplied it by .5, and for do your best, and did exactly that. We then had 10 minutes to practice cup stacking and after that we had our post test. The results were very surprising. The hard goal group improved by 42%, the do your best group improved by 45$, and most notably, the medium group increased by 55%.

This lab is very relevant in a physical education setting because we want all of our students to set goals but we also want them to achieve those goals. We don't want our students getting burned out or losing motivation chasing an unattainable goal. This lab is a benefit to all physical educators and coaches too because goal setting is extremely important.

Check out this awesome video on speed stacking!