Hooping Around the Pond

Explain three important benefits of hoop play.

Hoop play helps to develop hand eye coordination as the students maneuver the hoop around their body. It also works on developing their foot eye coordination. The main benefit in my eye’s woud be total body awareness, because they are forced to coordinate their entire body to effectively move the hoop around.

Give an example of how hoops can be used to reinforce cognitive concept linked with classroom learning.

Hoops can help younger learners to learn and master colors, by having multiple different colored hoops set up around the gym, calling out a color and the students would have to run and stand in that color. You could also put a number in the middle of the hoops and the students would have to find the corresponding number that is called out by the teacher. The teacher could then take this a step further and have groups of students use the numbers in the hoops to do addition and subtraction problems. i.e. if they are standing in a one and then move to a four they would then have to find the number 5 and stand in that hoop.

Describe how hoops can be utilized to promote growth in the affective domain.

Cooperation and teamwork are easily worked on through hoop play. If there are 3 yellow hoops out on the floor and the teacher yells out yellow, all the students would have to work together to fit into that colors hoops. At first the teacher could start out with multiple different hoops of the same color and then slowly remove certain hoops making fitting into the hoops more difficult. This will create a sense of teamwork by having the students work together to figure out how to get everyone in the hoop together.

Utilize the internet to gather information about ponds and related ecology to use in you field experience teaching or future teaching.

Having a vast amount of animals and organisms living in the same space creates a sense of balance as well as give and take. Using the analogy of students “living in the same pond” could teach them about cohabitating. This sense of sharing is vital for any child to use, and tossing in animals like frogs and fish would make creating games and scenarios easy around a pond theme.