Are You Flexible

The experience I gained from working with the St. Mary’s students helped me realize that when working with young children it is important to be flexible and prepared with multiple ideas. Being flexible is important because there is no guarantee as to what grade level you may be running an activity with or how many children you will have participating. Also, depending on the activity that is chosen for a specific motor skill, the activity may not be affective in properly evaluating the skill; being prepared with multiple activities for all ages is important so all of the time available is used constructively. For example, when playing card sharks with the older kids I noticed that the game was shorter than planned and the kids had ‘dead time’ where they sitting on the floor instead of moving. To make the game more affective I had the children flip the cards of their opponent so the game became continuous, instead of flipping their own cards and completing the activity when all their cards were flipped over. After this adjustment the game kept everyone moving and became appropriate for the older kids.