Physical education is one of the most contradictory disciplines in high school and middle school because some people love it more than everything else, but some people just hate it.
There are a lot of jokes and quite sad stories about how physical education lessons were held in schools. Even once there was a show in which celebrities were asked to repeat some exercises, to talk about their experience in physical education, and they definitely had completely different memories.
If you are faced with the task of coming up with interesting, practical fitness activities for physical education that do not require special sports equipment, then this article will come in handy.
If you want your students to love this subject and this course, or at least relate to it without outright rejection, then you must first think about their interests and how they fit with the goals of your course.
Which Fitness Activities are Suitable for PE
Of course, there are an infinite number of activities that could be used in physical education classes, but it is important to focus on those that will last. Because this is not a club session, but a course, and you need to see the progress of your students from the beginning of the semester to the end of the semester.
There are obvious limitations when it comes to planning fitness activities suitable for PE, and we tried to consider them when writing this article. Obviously, we cannot know the conditions you work in, but hope this list will be useful anyway.
Various Fitness Challenges
Students love to compete, and almost all the sports we like to watch on TV are competitive sports. Of course, you can talk a lot about the fact that the main thing is victory over yourself and your own development, but it is very important how you move forward compared to other students.
You can arrange different fitness challenges, for example, the flexibility challenge or the abdominal muscle challenge or the walking challenge, both for the whole group and for individuals. If you are satisfied with the whole group, then you must set a goal, and the group must gain some amount of physical activity to achieve this goal, or, individually, which can be compared with each other.
Dancing Activities
Modern dances are very active, they are suitable for both girls and boys, non-binary students.
They appeal to students’ interests in music and to pastime. And in general, if you have the opportunity to invite someone who would conduct modern dance classes in physical education classes, then you will definitely attract the attention of your students and help them get in better physical shape. Check online and ask around more.
Net Sports
Net sports are an evergreen classic. They are played all over the world and differ only in what kind of sport is the most popular among students, it can be volleyball, badminton or any games over the net that you come up with as a coach.
How to Make PE Classes Work
Even when you come up with good, interesting, as you think, physical activities for your sports class, it may turn out that students are not so interested in it, they get bored during the lesson, and they do not have the results that you would like to see.
Perhaps some of these tips will be useful to you in order to make the physical education program more relevant to the interests of students and meeting fitness goals for their age.
Prefer Group Challenges to Individual Ones
There’s a lot of stress these days, students worry about the high competitiveness of the environment they’re in. And it won’t end in college or at work. Therefore, on the one hand, the spirit of competition is important and valuable in sports, but on the other hand, if we are talking about achieving fitness goals, then it may be more useful and ethical to set group goals, where each participant can score points and help the team move forward.
In this case, you need to come up with some kind of encouragement for the team as a whole and motivate the stronger students to help the weaker students.
Take Interest in Your Students
Everything is individual, our interests are individual. How our body reacts to different tasks, including exercise, is also individual. Of course, when you make a general program, you cannot take into account the strengths and weaknesses of every student who comes to your physical education class.
But on the other hand, during the semester or academic year, you can get to know your students better and help them individualize the program that is already there. It takes some time, but it’s worth it, because you will see your students’ personal fitness and health results grow much more than the average across the board.
Tell Them That Grades are not Everything
Of course, this doesn’t exactly apply to physical activity, but as a physical education teacher, you may care about the moral and physical condition of your students. Now students are under so much pressure, they are very much focused on academic assignments, academic processes, and this affects their health.
Hiring essay writers from a professional academic writing service, SmartWritingService, we got to know that students address them mostly not because they can’t write something complex, but because there are too many papers and assignments with too little time to deal with them. You can help them by building an exercise program that will help them cope with stress and anxiety and lower their cortisol levels.
You should talk to students about finding a healthy balance between mental and physical activity and putting more emphasis on the knowledge they receive than on the grades, of course, if these grades are sufficient to move forward along the educational path.
We hope that these tips have helped you make your PE class more interesting and rewarding, as well as find an individual approach to the different students in your classes.
