Learn how I plan and organize my yearly PE lesson plan in a webinar that I hosted for the Gopher Solutions Webinar series.
Tips for Creating a Yearly PE Lesson Plan
Having a plan for the school year is essential. It all starts with identifying the essential learning targets you want students to know and be able to do. 
The SHAPE America National Physical Education Standards and your state standards are your guides. Once you know what students should know and be able to do, you can begin to design how you will assess this and plan when this will happen. If you’re struggling finding ways to incorporate standards into your teaching, visit my blog that walks through the 4-S approach to planning sport and team-based activities. This blog breaks down the standards into four categories: Skill, strategy, sportsmanship and scoring.
Identify Learning Targets
In my school district, we have identified the essential learning targets (also called Power Standards) and developed a competency map for each grade level that serves as a progression of the learning targets. From here, we had to develop proficiency scales for each competency. What does it look like to demonstrate proficiency in this competency? Currently, our district uses four levels of proficiency: below, approaching, meeting, or exceeding. These levels of learning are a good way to communicate to students (and for students to self-reflect upon) where they are at a specific point in time for a specific learning target.
Planning Assessments
The proficiency scales also help me plan assessments. Since I have identified what I want students to know and be able to do and what that looks like, I can now plan assessments (formative and summative) for student learning. All of this planning helps me outline my year. I update my “at-a-glance” yearly schedule and use this to begin lesson planning. All of these items are living documents; they are not set in stone. I am always reflecting upon how I can improve my teaching and student learning. It’s a continuous cycle of teaching, reflecting, and planning.
FREE PE Lesson Plan Curriculum Resource
If you do not have a curriculum or are looking for new curriculum ideas, there is a 100% FREE and complete resource in the Dynamic P.E. ASAP curriculum! Dr. Robert Pangrazi’s textbook, Dynamic Physical Education, has been brought to life online and offers all of his lesson and yearly plans. You can filter for what you need by grade level, standards, equipment available, etc. Customize your yearly plan with a wide variety of elementary and middle school activities.
Organizing My Yearly PE Lesson Plan
Now that I have planned the school year, I need to organize for it. An important document that guides my preparation is my Start-of-the-Year-Checklist – linked below. It helps me wrap my mind around what needs to be done before Day 1 with students.
Whether you have a district team, department, or online professional learning community to support you, I recommend having a way to save and share resources, so you are not constantly reinventing the wheel. Our department uses Google Drive to share all planning resources, checklists, policy forms, assessments, and lesson plans with each other in our Physical Education Department drive. Each teacher has their own drive as well that is linked to this team drive so that we can share, edit, and collaborate on items and still have our own items. Now, Google even has an official Team Drive shared space system you can check out to see if this will work for you to share, organize, and collaborate.
In the ‘year-at-a-glance’ template shared above, each of the headers (Warm-ups, Fitness, Motor Skills, and Physical Activity) link to that particular planning folder in our shared drive. For example, when viewing my planning sheet, I notice that it is time to switch to a new warm-up. I click on the “Warm-up” header, and it takes me to the warm-ups shared folder where I can view the activity instructions, edit, and print the new warm-up signs.
Thanks for reading! I hope you can view the webinar as well to help put this all together. I look forward to sharing more on learning targets, attendance, warm-ups, lesson closure, and technology tips in future blogs. Thank you for teaching!
