4/19/2012 Group Games and Physical Activity

    This week we were planning on doing presentations with three groups, one of which was mine. My group had decided to join with group 5 to make a two hour long activity and we were planning a scavenger hunt. Of all the days of the week, Thursday was the only one were the forecast stayed true and it ended up raining. This was disappointing and we ended up rescheduling our presentation for a day in May so check back to hear how our community integration scavenger hunt goes. Group 4 was the only group to present today and they taught us about physical activity for different groups.
    The first activity we did was sheet volleyball and was aimed at the elderly population. It was intended to help with fine motor skills. I can see this being beneficial to several populations like young children that need work on fine motor skills and people who have suffered some loss of function in their hands and are working on improving it. It was also good for teamwork because we had to work together to figure out the best way of getting the ball up and over to the other team. It could easily be an ice breaker for any group. Our second game was charades and was aimed at children with autism. We had partners and were in two circles that walked around each other. The facilitators would call out an act, and we had to get to our partner and act it out. Some of them were fun but others just made me feel silly. I'm not sure how well children with autism would like this game because they are all so different. I think it might be hard getting some children to get with partners and work together to act things out. We also played this game for a slightly long period of time in which I became bored. For children with short attention spans this game should not last as long. They also might enjoy coming up with their own charades. The last activity was humans vs. zombies and was meant for people with visual impairments. This game was fairly simple, but even so it was easy to forget which role you were playing because you changed so often. I think it was also easy to forget to change roles when you were supposed to because you were concentrating on remembering your part and not crashing into anyone. I think this game would work best with children and teenagers, but adults might feel awkward of silly.
    My favorite activity was sheet volleyball and is the activity that I would be the most likely to do again. This class period was beneficial because we had class in a racket-ball court which caused sounds to echo and was hard to hear in. This made us think up strategies to use in the future if we were to be in a similar environment. We decided that the best plan was to split a large group into smaller groups and allow different facilitators to give instructions to each group. Well that's all for now, who knows what next week will hold.