Field Experience Day Three

Today in field experience was the first real day that we got to work with the kids and really started learning their names. The students were again continuing with the hand-eye coordination stations, but we saw a different class today instead of the other class we had worked with the last two days.

The area of reflection today is students with special needs. In the other class we originally worked with, the skill level around the class was pretty even. There were some stand-outs whether they stood out as being really good, or needing work, but over-all the skills were on the same page. This class was different. The skill ranges were incredible. There were some students that played pickle ball extremely, there were some middle of the road students, and then were students who struggled to serve the ball correctly. I was working on a court where there were students who were lower skilled. One of the students was really far behind the other students and I worked with him the most. I inadvertently brought science into the lesson by talking to him about how angles work, so he would see that he was hitting the ball at too high of an angle.

I did not have the students pay attention to the rules of the game of pickle ball, the only rule I made sure they followed was the switching of the servers so that every student got a turn practicing the serve and I made sure they stayed in the boundaries. After my master teacher took aside the student I was originally working with I worked with another student who had trouble with returning the ball. The student seemed more content to serve the ball and let his partner hit it back and I had to explain to him that was not how it worked. He had good form he just had the problem of hitting it to far so that the ball did not land in bounds, so I worked with him on hitting the ball more lightly and just trying to get in bounds, and not worry about over bearing his opponents.