D-Day! Day 32

Today was my Lab D day!

     I'll be honest I was so nervous.  I knew I had to make this lesson awesome because there's a lot riding on it.  Number one is that this Lab is weighted the most grading wise.  Number two I didn't do the best I could have on the previous labs so I needed to do well on this one to make up for it.  Number three this is one of my Professor's favorite lessons so I didn't want to let him down.  And lastly the guy who invented the gaming system came to our lessons so I didn't want to let hime down! Stressful!  But I did fine and he seemed impressed so all is well.

     My instant activity was a spring egg hunt.  It was about a week and a half after Easter so I knew it was too late to call it an Easter egg hunt.  I hid the plastic colorful eggs throughout the classroom.  Inside the eggs were the answers to the questions on the diabetes worksheet I had passed out.  Here's one of my mistakes.  I didn't realize how long it was going to take them to finish the worksheet.  Haha, I guess I made the eggs too hard to find.  Next thing I knew it was already 5 minutes into my lesson.  And here's another mistake, I should have played music while they were looking and doing the worksheet because as you can see from my video the first 5ish minutes are just dead air and it was very boring.  I then went over the worksheet and talked about what our focus was for the lesson which was Diabetes.  I drew a picture of a little boy who was "my nephew Evan"  and has type 1 diabetes.  I had described how today was his 7th birthday and all he wanted for his birthday was to eat his birthday goodies which were cake, ice-cream, and candy.  Throughout the lesson I also mentioned that he loved soda too.  Even though these aren't exactly the healthiest choices they were permitted only for today because it was his birthday. 

I asked them to be in a plank position but
they could modify it by doing a plank from the knees

      The game we were playing was Stepmania exergaming punching bags.  Basically this is like DDR but instead of stepping on a dance pad you strike a big punching bag with the arrows on it.  I described the activity in that all of my students were team insulin and that each and every one of them was an insulin molecule and that they needed to help out my nephew Evan by travelling in his blood stream and taking care of all the glucose molecules in his blood from eating all of his birthday goodies.  I said that the arrows on the screen were the glucose molecules and that we had to neutralize them.  I let them play a few songs with just one person at the punching bag at a time.  For each song the people who weren't at the bags I had them at practice dance pads hitting it with a partner in a plank position.

"INSULIN SHOT!"

     After a few songs to warm up and get used to it a bit, I had them do an activity I like to call Insulin Shot.  In this activity the difficulty level of the song will be bumped up to hard.  One student will be at each punching bag to start out.  Then 2 students will be assigned to assist the first student at each bag.  These 2 will be waiting behind a line ready to come in and help when they hear the signal.  One of these two will help by taking the left arrow and the other will have the right.  Then the original will only be responsible for the top and bottom arrows.  I will play the song for about 30 seconds.  While the one student struggles to keep up with the arrows the other students are waiting patiently to help.  Then when the time is right I scream INSULIN SHOT!  that is the signal for the others to run in and help.  The goal here is to make a come back and be able to complete the song with at least a 75%.  Everybody seemed to really like this part of the lesson.  It was my favorite part too.  There was a moment in my lesson where Devon had hit the side arrows as I was setting up the song and he had changed the difficulty.  I didn't notice that he did it until I watched the video.  I had thought that the other bag was the one that had changed so there was a moment towards the end where I panicked a bit.  My time coding form shows almost a minute of waiting time there which stinks because I think I would have had <5% waiting time if I hadn't made that mistake.