Cub documenting 2 & 3 INCOMPLETE

Wednesday March 17

Today I met the children and had the opportunity to talk with them about road signs and why we have them.
The cubs were baffled that I knew their names before I had met them. Which was fun
It was really hard to get them to answer the questions one at a time, but they got the basic understanding of the signs we had to show them.
I tied up the road safety lesson with a quick talk about traffic lights, making sure the kids knew what the different colours meant. this was a good transition into our new game!

I taught them the very basic rules to the red light green light game. red is go green is stop, and I decided to throw in yellow, which meant slow(even though technically that is not what it means on the traffic light-oh well!)
We had a deaf boy in the cub group so I had to change the game from how I learned it as a child. Instead of calling out the colours, I had to flash coloured paper. It worked to our advantage actually, because as we quickly learned, once the cubs had ran passed me they could no longer see the colours and ran all the way to the finish. ( somewhat more accurately representing cars in an intersection)
So we changed the game so that the cubs had to run passed me no matter where I stood in the room. the kids had to be more aware and alert, because I would run across the room and they`d have to chase me!

Unfortunately, replicating the fundamentals in their own signs was almost a complete failure, with the exception of 2 or 3.



Wednesday March 24

Today was the big day: the Finale And it couldn't have gone any better! It was cold outside, so Rob's plans for an outdoor game were scrapped. In his plan, Rob structured it so that he and I would be almost working as a pair with the children. It was structured so much better than last week, and I was much more comfortable in this set up. I had a few minutes to chat with the kids and get them thinking about colour symbols and how we use colour in language to describe feelings. They nailed it. Stella ( the outspoken 11 year old girl) brought up the expression green with envy, Justin tried to turn his face red when I had mentioned how in cartoons the character's face will turn red when they're angry. Other children mentioned things like feeling blue when they're sad, and it went well the kids were digging it. Because we kept the pace up and keep the kids moving around I had a much more successful outing.


Wednesday March 31 2010

SOOO.. today was the presentations day, and I relayed my experience to the class.
I need not explain what happened, you were there!
I did get some interesting feedback today though. Thank you for the strategies,
for playing the games, and being patient with my lack of pictures.

Documenting isn't just about taking notes about what we did,
to document with a purpose there ought to be a central question.

So I have to ask: To what degree should Kinetic learning/teaching be embraced and incorporated in a community learning experience?

I have to say, getting those kids to pay attention was very difficult. Unlike high school kids, with whom I have experience coaching, the 10-12 year olds' attention is primarily concerned with figitting and only God knows what they chatter about. Some of the techniques I use with the rugby players are very inappropriate for children that age, for example yelling at them to get them to listen, or making off colour remarks or sexual innuendo when they do something well.

With the incredible level of energy in the 10-ish year old group, I would argue that Kinetic learning should be the equal if not superior to dictation or reading. I witnessed firsthand how the children would pick up on underlying concepts in games, for example, the necessity of rules and the consistency of those rules in society. Compared to their general unwillingness or inability to sit still for 10 minutes to participate in a show and tell type of work, hitching onto their energetic behaviour is pretty much the only way to get through to them.
It is not as though they are incapable of listening to an adult, because like I mentioned in class, the most apparently disconnected outsider of the group had absorbed and reflected the most from the discussion about traffic signs.

Looking back I wish I had employed a more ‘game-like’ method for displaying and discussing the road-signs they had drawn. I was pleased with how the games went well and their eagerness to talk about colour symbols.

With a university audience I noticed that the kinetics wasn’t accepted as wholly. This could be for several reasons,
· It was the end of class and people wanted to go
· At our age the linguistic and abstract thinking centres are dominant, not kinetic thinking
I’ll let you decide which is the most likely. ;)