With the colder weather this past week we were indoors. Well, the 1st and 2nd graders were indoors at the chilly ice rink, working hard and having fun.
Senior Kindergarten
Continuing with our focus on doing manipulative activities, this week the children were working on tossing and catching. To make things just a little more interesting, we tossed ghosts and bats. In tossing to self, the children are encouraged to bring their hands into their bodies as they catch the item to assist in making the catch successful. Tossing and catching is also a great activity to work on hand - eye coordination. Hand-eye coordination is the ability of the vision system to coordinate the information received through the eyes to control, guide, and direct the hands in the accomplishment of a given task, such as handwriting or catching a ball. Hand-eye coordination uses the eyes to direct attention and the hands to execute a task. So, as you can well imagine, this needs lots of practice. Have your child practice tossing and catching at home - small balls, or beanie babies can be good choices - just make it a nice open space since their coordination in tossing isn't always accurate!
1st & 2nd Grades
It has been an interesting week at the rink. Our first two days went well and both Mrs. Herbst and I are pleased with the children's skating ability. Our new students that haven't done ice skating before have really been impressive by picking up the skills so quickly. Our focus this week is to build strong forward skaters. The children in second grade have learned that the forward stroke consists of three parts - stroke, glide and recovery. We also talked briefly about the importance of bending our knees to get more power out of each stroke. We practiced keeping our knees bent in both grades by a "follow me - listening" game. During class, we divide the children up to give them more individual attention to work on developing their personal ice skating skills. At the end of class we play fun ice games to re-enforce the skills we are working on or do "mileage club" where the children are encouraged to move around the rink accumulating laps until time is called. The laps they do will go toward their "mileage club card" to earn a "toe tag" for their tennis shoes - children earn a tag for each 5 miles they go. On the ice - we have the children go five times around to equal a quarter mile on the track. A fun way for the children to see how many miles they move over the school year.
Thursday - the compressor went down - so the ice was a little puddley. Hopefully, you got my e-mail about this problem, especially if you were one of our wonderful skate tying parents.
3rd & 4th Grades
Since we only were together twice this week, we continued to work toward completing our fitness tests and we will finish up next week. Our focus for next week will be on fitness as well as health. 3rd grade will be looking at our first body system - the circulatory system so that we are ready to go to the Health Education Center the last week of this month. The fourth grade has completed their pre-test in our health unit Drug Defense. We will begin next week on our first unit on cells to start to understand the parts of the cells to better understand how the tiniest building blocks of our bodies can be affected by drugs.
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