Final blog

This class was an amazing class that was thought provoking and drove us to be better teachers. I really liked how we learned about different teaching strategies that applied to all of us students no matter what our content was. In this blog I will list different items I will use in my own class as well as how I will use them. I really want to get away from the norm of teaching and branch out to better suit students of all diverse learning abilities. 

Comprehension instruction- This is one of my favorite way to teach students to understand a little more about their reading comprehension skills. I can not tell you how many useless reading activities that I was able to bs my way through and get a great grade. I want to change the norm to help students understand more about what they are reading. In health they have a very good textbook that I will skim through the heading to give the students a front loading exercise to help them understand what the students will be reading.

Digital literacy- I will use technology in the classroom to help students understand concepts in both health and pe. I also hope to have software in the classroom to have students view themselves throwing a ball and analyzing their form. There is also some really good software that allows a student to record and analyze their diet.

Oral language- I feel it is very important for students to be able to express themselves orally in a group setting. This will be done by having discussions in class and also presentations to show the students that  other people feel the same way they do about different health ideas.

Text- I want to have a mini-library in my classroom that gives further insight to important issues. Also there will be books in there to apply to special interests of students to broden their horizon.

Thanks Amy your the best!!

Reading

Reading was always hard for me growing up. I hated reading what everyone else made me read in class. Most of the texts were of these authors that died a 100 years ago and talked about things that dont happen anymore. It was not because I was awful at reading, because I actually was a decent reader. I just always felt it was unrelated and unimportant. Then the day came which we read a few John Steinbeck. John Steinbeck writing style is not what caught my attention, because he is very dry, but because I am from right outside Salinas California which is where he was from and wrote about. I could finally relate to a readers experiences and will keep reading for ever. I also found books related to my content area that were about people who were successful coaches and relayed their experiences and shared their wisdom. I was always have my students read and have assignments relating reading to PE and health

Affective Dimensions of Writing

Writing is a very interesting thing, it is most of the times the only way to appropriately and correctly convey thoughts to another person. For school age students it is frowned upon to question authority verbally so the only way they can express what they are saying is to write it down and hand it to another person. I do not know what this method is considered ok while verbally saying something is not. I have experienced this first hand, I did not agree with the teacher and I got in trouble for questioning the teacher verbally. Then I got the idea to write a letter and hand it to the teacher and the same exact point became valid and addressed in class.  I do not know if  by writing it down I became more educated and taken more serious or if my tone of voice is threatening, either way I have found many issues solved by the written word. 

There are other ways that I have loved to write that are a more fun way to express myself, research papers. I have found that by writing research papers you can really tell someone how you feel in an educated way. My favorite research paper that I have written was on childhood obesity and charging parents with child abuse for having a minor that is extremely overweight. I have always felt strongly by this and actually found a court case in which the parents receive some kind of punishment for it in almost every state.

I will use writing assignments in both my health and PE classes. I want students to apply the principles and lessons they learn in these classes to their everyday life. This wil help further to empower the students to a brighter future. These writing assignments will include items like answering controversial topics, choosing between two hard things, how they will make smart choices, and how PE can hel their quality of life.

Prototypical Experiences

I am a huge fan of the notion that everything I learn or read has or could have a real world application. If it does not have a real world application then I do not see the reason why I should even waist my time. Even algebra and calculus have a real world application to computer programing, etc. My content is health and PE. This is very specifically related to my favorite hobby, triathlons. I use the health side to modify my nutrition and balance of a healthy lifestyle to modify my daily habits. I also use the PE side for the correct biomechanics of running and creating fitness programs for strength training. These principles that I live my life by will be very easy to convey to my students by showing why everyone should live healthy and why we should also exercise.

It is very important for students to feel a sense of purpose for learning different ideas and this will be fun to show what students can do with health and PE. The students can be the best all state athlete or a student who has never run a lap in their life. Both students will (hopefully) be able to see what living a healthy life that consists of and how regular exercise can set them up for success today and their future. It will just be my job to make sure that the students feel that I am teaching to them specifically by using their own experiences of different sports and habits as my basis for establishing a connection to teach the students. The national standards also make it very easy to break down the different aspects of a healthy lifestyle in order to teach it to the students in a way that they can understand.

Blog 1 post

This is my first blog post and I would like to just tell a little about myself. I grew up in Monterey Ca loving the ocean and surfing. I went on an LDS mission in Arkansas and Tennessee. I love being adventurous and have finally narrowed my favorite interests to just a few: Triathlons, backpacking, skiing, and the ocean.

I am pursuing the educational goal of teaching Health and PE. I hope to teach for 3 years and then go back to school to receive my masters in teaching administration and become a principle. I love Health and PE so I will define them as the art of living healthy. I really am excited to teach others about my passion of health.

Literacy does relate to my field. My definition of literacy is the art of understanding the meaning behind the words. This applies to my field because of the different meaning of Healthy living. There are a lot of people who say they are healthy but they have a very unbalanced life. It is all about equally balancing all the different dimensions of health.