Ice Cream Cones Found Their Place in P.E.

For the second week in a row my group, The Sommersaults, had the privilege of working with the preschoolers! I love working with the pre-k because they are so full of creativity and imagination. If you get them engaged they are willing to listen and to play. It's not easy, but if you get their attention and keep it I guarantee the experience you have will be positive.

This week I actually got to do my craft with the students. We become Pirates and built our very own treasure chests! (Compliments of Corey Union)

I tried to the draw the pre-k kids in by asking them a string of questions like this, "Does everyone know what a pirate is?" "Where do Pirates live?" "What do Pirates love?" After the last question I received the word "GOLD!" from one of the students, so I then asked the question, "Where do Pirates keep their gold?" Immediately all the students shouted, "their treasure chest!"

At that moment I brought out the treasure chest I had already made at my dorm room and explained what they would be doing. It was simple, I gave them each a certain number of Crayons and asked them to write/draw whatever they want wherever they wanted on the box. I was amazed to see how focused they were the whole time. Out of the ten students who made one there was only one student, who was sitting next to me, who didn't feel like participating. So instead of asking him to color his own I asked him to help me or give me ideas of what I should draw on my chest. This seemed to work a lot better and he seemed to enjoy himself after that.


 Now to the best part, the ice cream!

Once again this week we didn't really have a good plan as to what game we wanted to do and it seemed that whatever game we tried really just got out of control or the kids got bored. For example, "builders and bulldozers" went well for 5 minutes but then the kids were bored. After two fairly successful attempts at getting a game going finally one of the students picked a cone up and but a ball on the bottom of it so it looked like an ice cream cone.

I immediately jumped on the opportunity and started asking all the students to make their ice cream cones. We ran, walked, jumped, skipped, crouched, twisted, tossed, and caught our ice cream cones in a number of different ways.


I had such a good time making up different scenarios with the ice cream cones that when I was done I hadn't realized how winded I was from running around and participating in the games. It was probably my favorite memory at St. Mary's from this semester.

The last thing I want to say in this blog is that I love my group and I want to thank both Dave and Mallory for being the best possible group members someone could ask for. Thanks :)