5 Tips for Instant Activity Success!

I’m going to share with you five tips that will instantly engage your students as they enter your classroom.

Instant activities are activities that students will do in the first five minutes of a PE class. I strongly believe these first five minutes are the most pivotal minutes of your entire lesson. If your students aren’t motivated within the first five minutes. You’re instantly behind the eight ball and you’re going to have a really tough time re-engaging them throughout the rest of your lesson. So think about the last time you didn’t give that movie or TV show more than five minutes before changing the channel. Why do we give up on something so quickly? We’re not interested looking at the first five minutes of your PE class, if your students aren’t engaged in the first five minutes, you’ve lost their interest. So here’s a quick exercise: Take five seconds and think about interest levels from your students when they enter your classroom. Would your students still be engaged after the first five minutes?

If you cannot confidently shout out a YES to this question, I’m going to encourage you to implement any or all of these five Instant Activity tips into your PE program.

Tip Number one, get moving right away. Don’t let your students sit down. Don’t take attendance. Get your students moving right away when they walk in the door. You can do this simply by posting your instant activity around your classroom for students to access.

Tip number two, change it up. After a while, your students are going to lose interest if they’re doing the same activity over and over just like someone would if they were watching a rerun on TV. New episodes of track, the viewer, New Instant Activities are going to attract your students.

Tip number three, give students choices. Students want choices. You’re going to win many conversation battles with your students. If you give them choices instead of one task for your class, give them three and let each student decide their own path to learning.

Tip number four, work at your own pace. Instead of giving students a set number of repetitions to complete in a task, give them a time limit and allow them to work at their own pace. An example of that would be, instead of doing 10 pushups, try practice pushups for one minute.

Tip number five, go from teacher led to student led. It’s an activities don’t have to be teacher led. Create that learning environment where your students can access a instant activity on their own and be independent. Again, this is the end result. We want students, when they leave our classroom, we want them to be independent learners and we want them to be able to have that knowledge to do that. You can have your instant activities be student led by being consistent with your routine and posting your Instant Activity around the classroom. These five Instant Activities work for me and they are sure to engage your students each day in your PE class. Go forth and inspire your students today!

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