Just like anyone who has played on a team before knows, communication is the key to succeeding. This picture is of a summer kickball league I was on last year right after we won our first game. We were so excited to win a game and we owe a lot of it to our communication skills. Not only did we need to speak and listen to each other, but we also needed to identify and interpret non-verbal cues like if someone was going to bunt or steal a base. Working as a team is difficult, but as long as everyone can “read” each other, your team will be communicating effectively (and hopefully winning games!).
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Team Work
Just like anyone who has played on a team before knows, communication is the key to succeeding. This picture is of a summer kickball league I was on last year right after we won our first game. We were so excited to win a game and we owe a lot of it to our communication skills. Not only did we need to speak and listen to each other, but we also needed to identify and interpret non-verbal cues like if someone was going to bunt or steal a base. Working as a team is difficult, but as long as everyone can “read” each other, your team will be communicating effectively (and hopefully winning games!).
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This is a great example of literacy. I never thought about being a team and working together as a form a literacy. The ability to interpret non-verbal cues is a very important aspect of literacy, it allows you to communicate in a different way. I'm on a volleyball team this summer and we have never played together before. It will be extremely important for us to communicate in these ways as well.
ReplyDeleteThis is great, I really like that you thought of useing this as a form of literacy because it most certainly is. I do not know if you use hand signals like in softball or baseball but I imiagine you do and in that case the language is most certainly visual. Plus, only those who know the given signs will be able to read them. I also think it is great that you are on a kickball team, it sounds like so much fun!!!
ReplyDeleteI have experienced this type of literacy too, when I played softball. My softball coach always wanted us to chew gum when we played to make the other teams nervous. (Sometimes I think it actually worked)! I have also experienced this many times when I was in theater productions at my high school. It got so my friends and I were able to "read" the audience and determine what kind of crowd we had. More often than not, they type of crowd we had affected how we performed on stage. It is more fun to act for a crowed that seems excited and happy to be in the audience than for those audiences who seem to want to just sleep! Furthermore, when I teach ballroom dancing, I have to stress the importance of the follower be able to read and interpret what the leader wants them to do next. This minimizes the number of toes that get squished! :)
ReplyDeleteI love sports, especially baseball. I recently went to a Twins game with my dad and I noticed that our conversations during the game usually revolved around the question "what would you do?" We had read the count the batter had, how many runners had on base, how many outs there were and what the score was to make our decision whether or not we thought that the batter should hit the ball into the outfield for a sacrifice fly so the runner on third could tag up and score to put the team ahead. Managers and coaches always are reading the pitcher to know when to pull him or if putting a left handed batter would be better in a certain situation. As a catcher, I would read the batter every swing to know whether to call for an inside fastball or a low and outside change up. Now that I think about it, there is also a lot of vocabulary that goes along with baseball as well- fastball, change up, suicide squeeze, full count.
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