Saturday, 20 July 2013

Week 3

Today was, as always, very interesting. We decided in Fridays discussion that we were going to play some games as a warm up activity incorporating inflatable beach balls and sea gulls to fit the idea of SUMMER. I thought this was a great idea as it gave both us and the Valence students something physical to work with.

Some of the games suggested were ones that used the ball as a prop:

- passing the ball around in a circle and using your imagination to convince the rest of the group that the ball wasn't ACTUALLY a ball.... but a ________. I thought this game was great because everyone could take part fairly and it proved to be quite funny too.

Other games saw the involvement of the ball as vital for the activity to be successful:

- my little group decided we wanted to challenge the students at Valence and played the classic child hood game of "don't let the ball touch the floor." This game wasn't as a successful as we first thought it would be because, although we did really really try to consider some of the students' ability, most of them did struggle with it. The ball inevitably touched the floor on more than one occasion but that was fine; I only gave it that name so the students could use it as an OBJECTIVE. 

This time also, I lead an activity which was something I decided I wanted to do last week. Myself and 2 others explained the activity above and although it didn't go exactly to plan, I'm still glad I lead an activity as it made me more noticeable to the other students and more open.

We also began learning a sunglasses sequence in pairs with the Valence students, but this wasn't very successful - in my opinion. For the first week ever me and Laurie BOTH finally remembered our sunglasses! I felt personally, this wasn't as successful as the other activities because it was far too fast paced for both me and the Valence students to keep up with. It was a lot of changing over and then turning around and then sunglasses up and then sunglasses down... I think we need to slow it down slightly and have some slower music and longer pauses in between the actions.

I also learnt about myself as a person today - usually I'm such an impatient person but I'm learning that keeping my cool is vital when working in an environment like this. I don't mean for that to sound like I want to start flipping chairs when I can't understand a student, it's just I myself can get frustrated pretty easily but I'm surprising myself these past few weeks. The students are great and easy to work with and I'm having a nice time! 

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