1st Grade PE Lessons and Activities

Measure your young students' ability to jump and land at various levels with a lesson addressing this motor skill. With the lesson, students learn to jump on command and with various cues. To complete this activity, you will need a long rope, music or pictures to serve as visual or auditory cues. Show students how to jump at the command of a cue. Elicit the help of a student, and have him randomly turn on music or hold up the cue card whenever he feels like. Walk around, and jump when the student performs the cue. Illustrate this concept until students feel comfortable practicing. Then break students up into free play on the playground. Tell students that they will need to pay attention to the cues, as they will jump as high as they can when the cue happens. Roam the playground, and execute the cue randomly. This allows students to master the motor skill of jumping and landing. Expand this concept further, and teach students how to jump over a rope or in a game like hopscotch.

Play tick-tock with your students to teach them how to throw underhand. To use this activity, you will need a target that students will hit with a small ball or bean bag. Tell your students that when you pull your arm back you say "tick" and when it goes forward you say "tock" as you release the ball. Demonstrate this concept as students say "tick-tock." Teach your students to aim to reach the target as you throw the ball. Break students into teams, and let them practice throwing and aiming to hit the object as they say "tick-tock." Let your students compete against each other within their teams, and the team that hits the target the most wins.

Teach your students about their bodies while they are physically active. To complete the activity, you will need two objects for each student and three buckets. Place the buckets in a circle in the grass or in a gymnasium, with the objects evenly divided amongst the buckets. Provide instruction to your students about how oxygen travels in the body. You can demonstrate this with a video or pictures. Then tell students that they are going to pretend to be oxygen. Have each student line up at the first bucket called, "The Mouth." The first student will take a deep breath and pick up an object from the bucket. Then she will run to the second station, "The heart," where she contracts her body (pretend to be a ball) like a heart and picks up another object. After this stage, she will run to the third bucket, "The Muscle," where she places her objects in the bucket and then performs an exercise. You can tell her the exercise or have a picture of one. Types of exercises are jumping jacks, running in place or push-ups. Lastly, the student runs back to "The Mouth" to get more oxygen. Repeat until all students have had a turn.