A few weeks ago, I realized that I needed to tackle PE and come up with a short-term and long-term plan for my kids (and me). During the summer, they take swimming lessons and in the past during the school year, I've enrolled them in dance and gymnastics, but we didn't want to do that this year. I had planned on signing my kids up for soccer this year, but I missed the deadlines. So, I made plans with a friend and her 2 kids to get together for PE once a week.
Of course since I'm a planner, I felt like I needed to come up with a big, overarching plan. I'm definitely a planner. A friend at church had mentioned to me that she and her girls were running this fall for PE. I think that idea stuck in my head. And that's where we started.
The first week, we ran around our house 4 times (one lap is about 75 yards), stretched, and started learning how to do jumping jacks.
Here's the routine:
Stretch:
1) Reach up and then reach down to touch your toes.
2) Hamstring stretch
3) Calf stretch
Run, increase 1 lap every week or every other week (I haven't figured out what our goal number of laps for this year will be yet.)
Walk a lap for cool down.
Jumping jacks. We started by jumping in and out 5 times. Then doing our arms 5 times. Then we do 5 single jumping jacks. Then we do 2 in a row 3 times. Then we do 5 jumping jacks together.
That's our daily workout. I did calculate how far we run and each lap around our house is about 75 yards. My kids have very little endurance, which I realize is my fault, so we're working on this.
But, I realized that I needed to get the big picture and put together a PE plan. I'll be honest. The Horizons PE book is great. It's very thorough. Yearly plans are premade and it covers all the physical skills your children need to learn. There's one book for K-2, one for grades 3-5, one for grades 6-8, and one for high school. They're each about $35, but they're thorough. I think they'd work well if you had at least one family (or more than 3 kids) to play the games with. I haven't seen the older books though, so I'm not sure if the older books require enough kids for teams or if they are adaptable to small families and groups under 10 kids.
So, if you are trying to be frugal like me, here's the plan I've come up with and compiled in a PE notebook...
I made these tabs:
1) Goals: I wrote down my goals for my kids and for me.
2) Daily Plan: Stretching, run laps, jumping jacks and pretend jump rope
As my kids get older, I will add in pushups and crunches to our daily routine.
3) Colleciton of Warm-Up Games from this site: http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/pe/contents.htm
4) What they need to learn: I made a list of the skills they need to learn in grades K-3 and then used a few other websites http://sbsphysicaleducation.intuitwebsites.com/Kindergarten_Physical_Education.pdf
5) Benchmarks: What is a good gauge for my kids
http://westborough.ma.schoolwebpages.com/education/components/form/default.php?sectiondetailid=11885&sc_id=1183839307
http://www.farmington.k12.mi.us/lon/classrooms/pe/pe_fitness_benchmarks.php
6) Yearly Plans: Once a week I get together with a friend's family for PE. My plan is to pick a basic skill, and a game or two for each week (along with our basic daily plan).
Along the way of putting together my notebook, I found some great sites.
Here are a few of them:
http://www.teachingideas.co.uk/
http://www.pecentral.org/
http://www.pe4life.org/news---resources/recommended-websites/
http://www.pelinks4u.org/
We've been using our simple plan for a month now and I can see my kids endurance and strength improving. The endorphins from daily exercise are also helpful. We do have a covered porch, so I know that there will be days that we work on jumping rope instead of running laps.
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