Last day!

Today we went to Beaudry Park and drove some golf balls and then we played some football and then we went to the women's softball game for about 45 minutes. Penny gave me a left handed and right handed driver so he thought it was funny to watch me try to hit a ball left handed the entire time. We worked on stance and keeping eyes on the ball and our knees bent. When he missed a ball it was usually due to not looking at the ball or standing up. After he got bored, we tossed the football around til we had to take the equipment back. He asked if we could go check out the womens softball game til he had to leave so we watched that for awhile and he liked that because he played little league for awhile.

Madden 12'

Willie really really wanted to play my roommates new Madden game on his xbox, so we played Madden. He was the giants of course and I picked the packers. I lost pretty badly, I never played a football video game before, so I had a hard enough time getting the controls down.

Last Guitar Lesson

Today we had our last guitar lesson. Willie remembered all the chords from last time which I was really suprised and proud of! I quickly learned two songs off youtube to teach him. One was "Honey Bee" which is a country song, so he loved it. The other I just stumbled upon, LMFAO's "Party Rock Anthem." He doesn't like pop music so that song was very short lived. He caught on to the song pretty quickly and with some practice I think he would be pretty good at in in 3 weeks. However, we only have a week left and he would like to work on something else before we end project dream.

Easter Weekend

I didn't see Willie Friday, because I was home for Easter and I just want to show how cute my dog is :) Awwwww!

Shipwreck!

I wanted to take him to the driving range, but he thinks he will not be good at it and will think about it if we do more short range golf. So we did the outside course at shipwreck golf. He did improve a lot from the last time we went to the indoor course. However, once he gets really close to the hole, he tends to cheat a little bit, but all kids do that in mini-golf! One thing i did like about the outdoor course was that at some of the holes they had a wheel that you spun then you had to do what that wheel said, for example, "hit with the opposite end of the club at this hole" or "your first shot must be between the legs." So that was fun to watch each other trying to complete goofy maneuvers.

Golf!

Friday we took my two 9 irons I had laying around and some golf balls and went down to the back of the park and hit some golf balls. We are going to need a lot of work. I don't think he is use to hitting a golf ball. He did play baseball and he is using some of the mechanics he learned in hitting a baseball. He really enjoyed trying to see who could hit it the farthest! He beat me a lot. His parents are out of town for two weeks and he is staying with one of his parents friends. He showed me their dog who is a pure breed huskey! Beautiful! So we also played with the dog for awhile.

Guitar!

Willie is ALWAYS talking about his favorite country artist and how he is moving down to Tennessee to work for Blake Shelton and write his songs for him. When ever we are doing something he is always singing some song and asking me "who sings that?!" Luckily, I am a country fan myself. I took guitar lessons for a long time when I was little, but quit in high school when my sports were getting more consuming. I haven't touched my guitar since 8th grade and was hoping all my guitar knowledge would come flooding back to me! So I went home and got my guitar and brought it up for Willie, because I thought it would be cool for him to learn the songs of his favorite country artist! I learned a few songs, luckily guitar playing came back to me pretty quickly, and now I'm showing Willie to play some chords. Last Tuesday he learned the E-minor, E-major and C-major chords! He really enjoyed playing with my pedal and making the guitar make weird and crazy sounds out of the amp.

Football!

Since Friday had very nice weather, I decided to take Willie to the park on Owego Street to play football. Once of my friends, Josh, was nice enough to come to the park and play football with us. Willie thought it was cool to have a guy play football with him and show him a few things about football. We practiced throwing, catching and punting. Then we ran some plays and Willie enjoyed being quarter back. Then the high school softball team came for practice so we left so they could have their field.

Hoxie Gorge

This day did not go as planned. With a set of paper directions and a GPS I managed to get very very lost and could not find Hoxie gorge to save my life because it kept bringing me to his dirt road that was not Hoxie Gorge. After an hour of driving around in circles and down muddy dirt roads in the middle of no where, I finally found it. By the time I got there we only had 30 minutes to go hiking before he had to leave. So today was not good, but I will make it up to him with some football next meeting!

Bowling!

At our last meeting Willie and I went bowling at the 281 lanes and bowled 3 games. At first he was throwing the ball across his body and pointing his thumb incorrectly. I gave him some pointers to improve his form and after rolling two frames of gutter balls, he rolled two strikes!! All three games were very close!

He talked ALOT about country stars and how he is going to move down to Tennessee and work with all the country stars by writing songs for them :) So I told him about how I brought up my guitar and we could start learning songs by his favorite artist as long as it's O.K. with his mom.

His mom was running late and I really needed to sign up for graduation. So he came with my roommates and I to the graduation finale at Corey. He signed the "graduation class of 2012" banner, which I thought was pretty funny and so did he. He always makes sure he wears his SUNY-Cortland t-shirt on Tuesdays and Fridays so he looks just like all the college students, I think that's pretty cool so I make sure to bring him around where there are a lot of students for social interaction and he loves just being at the campus!

Hiking at Lime Hallow!

On Friday before I left for break Willie and I took advantage of the warmer weather and went to Lime Hallow to go hiking. I have never been there before so I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. I thought it was awesome! The trails are all very nice and well marked. Willie liked it and lead the way on the trails. It was a little muddy due to the melted snow, but it was pretty warm. There was a lot of different projects that looked like different groups made or donated on all the trails. After we were done hiking we went to Neubig for some hot chocolate so we could warm up. He also had some cookies of course.

Black light mini golf!

I heard about the blacklight mini golf at shipwreak a few weeks ago and thought that Willie might really enjoy that. So today we went to shipwreak and he loved it! Luckily he was wearing a white t-shirt so he really glowed under the blacklight. The facility made a very awesome course that had multiple themes. One theme was the jungle and it had elephants, gorillas, alligators and lions around the course at each hole. When you went around the corner there were pirates and treasure. Willie didn't like the pirates he thought they were scary! Lastly, there was an underwater theme with sea turtles, sharkes and jelly fish.




I think he really loved it, he was constantly yelling, "Holly look at this! look at this!" and pointing to a drawing on the wall. He loved how his shoe laces glowed and his t-shirt. He actually beat me by 3 strokes, it was a very close game!

HOCKEY!!!

Last Friday I had practice the same time that Willie was coming to Cortland. I had asked him before if we would like to learn how to skate and he said yes, so this was a great oppertunity. Not only did he get to learn how to skate, but also try some ice hockey!

My roommate luckily is the same size as Willie so we got some equipment from him to fit Willie. When we got out on the ice he was pretty scared at first about falling and hurting himself, but I kept telling him thats what the helmet is for and it's ok to fall lots of people do it! One of the girls got him a ice walker, which is an assistance device to help him work on getting use to the ice without having to worry about falling because he can put all his weight on the walker. He then started zooming around on the walker and finally we got him to skate a little with just the hockey stick. When he got tired he would go sit on the bench and one of the girls would come over and keep him company so it was great for him socially!

At the end of practice he took a few shots on the net and all the girls cheered I don't think I have ever seen a smile so big on his face before! I think he had an awesome time and it was a great experience for him.

Racquetball!

Tuesday the 21st I met with Willie again for a second time. First we went and got lunch and he liked being surrounded by all the college students and the atmosphere. Next we did a scavenger hunt around park center and Lusk field house. He liked finding the clues, but he REALLY did not like running. He gets out of breath and tired very quickly. I also noticed that if there was a college student in the hall way he would stop dead in his tracks and walk, I am thinking this is maybe a I don't want to look like a fool running around thing.
Next we went down into the racquetball courts because I felt like he asked a lot of questions about racquetball at our last meeting. We had a bigger ball so it did not bounce as fast as a regular racquetball. I think this did help especially with his hand eye coordination. After racquetball we played handball which is a game he learned at school and I had never played before so it was a learning experience for me. After that we went into the racquetball court with the golf net and practiced our football punting because all the gymnasiums were taken up. However the net was nice and bumped the ball back to us. Lastly, we worked on snapping the football to each other.

First meeting..

I met with my student for the first time on Friday December 17th. When he arrived he had just had swim practice at the college pool, so he was tired. I created a poster and at the top is his physical activity goal, which is going to be, "be a better football player." Under the dream is listed four goals that will work toward the dream and for every goal he achieves he gets a reward, ex) Hiking at Lime Hallow. I also created a "playbook," which is a notebook compiling all the things we worked on this semester for reference later after the program is over. In the first section of the notebook, is the exercises we do and learn in class. Last meeting we did exercises you can do with a rope, ex) jump rope, jump rope push ups and ski jumpers. This was to show him you don't need fancy equipment to get a work out. The next section is our step log, we will be wearing pedometers to record the amount of steps we take every lesson. He learned that you need to take at least 10,000 steps a day! We took 3,501 steps during our meeting on Friday! The next section is football plays that we will learn this semester that I had photocopied out of my football notebook. The last section is a behavior log, he gets a sticker at the end of the lesson if he behaved the entire lesson.

When we started we did the warm up, but he said he was really tired from swim class and did not really try in the warm up. Next we worked on catching and throwing which he is pretty good at! However, we noticed that one thing we need to work on is punting and it will be one of our goals this semester. Next, we ran some plays and tried to reach 10 successful plays with out dropping a pass. Lastly, I placed hoops on the wall in which he had to throw the football to the middle of the hoop color I called out. After we were finished I took him on a tour around park center and the field house so he gets an idea of other activities we can do this semester. We will be meeting again on Tuesday!