Kaelyn Hogan
Ed. Found. 235-002
Child and Adolescent Development
November 21st, 2010
Extracurricular Activities (p. 383) Children’s activities, such as organized sports, music lessons, or afterschool clubs, that occur outside the regular school curriculum.
I believe that extracurricular activities are an important part of a person’s life. They give people
the chance to be a part of a team, while also providing chances for teammates to learn how to
cooperate and communicate effectively with one another. I think the earlier a child is involved in
extracurricular activities the better. Children need to be exposed to diverse activities in order to
develop hobbies later in life.
This concept relates to my personal life because growing up I was always involved in
extracurricular activities. Starting at age 2, my parents enrolled me in swimming lessons. I was in a class
with approximately 9 other children. Even though I was not able to talk and carry on a conversation
with them, I still had the experience of being around other children my age. Swimming turned into a
hobby of mine. I looked forward to summer, so I could be outside doing laps in the pool in my backyard.
Once I entered high school I tried out for the swim team and was on varsity for all 4 years. The sport I
am currently still involved in is softball. I started with t-ball when I was 4, and this was because my dad
was, and still is, a head varsity baseball coach at the high school level. I came to love the sport. Also, in
high school, I was a starter on the varsity team for 4 years and we won the Division 2 State
Championship my freshman year, in 2006.
Participating in extracurricular activities helped me develop lifelong skills such as cooperation
and working with others, teamwork, leadership, and time management. The ability to be able to
cooperate and work with others is a skill that I will need as a future educator. I will need to be able to
cooperate with my colleagues so that we can work together to give our students the best education
they can have. Extracurricular activities taught me about teamwork, and how to work together with a
group of people to accomplish a common goal. I learned about leadership and how to be a successful
leader by participating in high school sports. In both swimming and softball I was the team captain,
which helped me understand the importance of being a good role model. My teammates looked up to
me, and every decision I made not only affected me, but it affected my team as well. Knowing these
things will help me apply it in my future career as a teacher. I know that my students will look up to me
as a role model and the decisions I make will affect my students as well as me. The time that my extracurricular activities took up helped my time management skills tremendously. I understood that I
needed to manage my time efficiently so that I could succeed in all aspects of my life, which included my
extracurricular activities, my schooling, and my family and friends.
Moral Judgments (p. 522) Judgments about right and wrong, fairness, and justice; for instance, answers
to questions about whether it is right to strike another person.
Children will face many circumstances throughout their lives when they will need to make moral
judgments. As a parent, I can begin teaching my children about moral judgments at a young age. By
doing this, it will make it easier on my children when they begin attending school because they will
already have learned the difference between things that are morally right and wrong. One of the first
things I can teach my children is that they need to share. One of the most common scenarios I can think
of is one child is playing with his/her toy and another child wants to play with it too. If the child whose
toy it is knows the difference between what is morally right and wrong, he/she will allow the other child
to play with the toy. A second thing I can teach my children is they need to keep their hands to
themselves. Hitting or kicking others is not nice and it hurts people physically as well as emotionally. As
a teacher, I know I will be dealing with both of these instances, especially if I teach elementary school
students. In order to educate my students about what is morally right and wrong, I can have posters in
my classroom showing the behaviors that are acceptable and not acceptable. Another way that I can
incorporate this in my classroom is to have my students act out a particular scenario that I would
provide for them. My students would need to act out the morally appropriate response to the given
scenario. I can only hope that by educating my own children as well as my students at a young age it will
lead to them making the correct moral judgments as they grow older.