Big Parachutes and Little Toys That Teach

This past Friday, October 7, 2011 I attended the P.E Mini Conference along with many other SUNY Cortland students and faculty. The activity that I attended was all about parachute activitie and other activities that can be done with smaller toys. The presentation began with the parachute and the guy who was presenting demonstrated numerous games that reguqired students to run, dance, and/or just continually shake the parachute. Either way all of the activities presented a lot of physical activity and a lot of new ideas for me because I had never seen a lot of the activities. The second part of the presentation pertained to several different activities that involved many different pieces of equipment. With on piece of equipment he had us doing balancing activities, cardiovascular jumping activites, and fine motor activities with shaking the stick. Being able to do so many different things with one piece of equipment is extremely beneficial because it allows  you to use the same thing numerous time in your curriculum without doubling up topics all the time. The last item we played with were called bits, which are slices of pool noodles. These were very entertaining and could easily keep children occupied for several hours. Overall, the presentation was very informative and definitely gave me a lot of ideas for the future and when I begin to put all my lesson plans together during student teaching.