Steal the Bacon
Physical Education Lesson Plan
Students will practice their listening skills and/or math skills or memory. They will increase their sprinting skills and stamina. They will learn about good competition skills.
gym, outside field, or large open space, bean bag
- Divide in the class in half randomly by picking names out of a hat or by drawing sticks with your students' names on them. Assign the numbers 1-15 (or half of the number of students you have) to one student on each team.
- Have the two teams line up about 50 feet apart, as shown in the diagram. Place the bean bag (the bacon!) in the middle of the two lines of students.
- Proceed to call out the numbers and have the two students assigned run and try to get the bacon before the student on the other team grabs it. The students who grabs the "bacon" first has to take it back to their line before getting tagged by the chaser. If they are tagged, neither team gets a point. Keep score for each team.
- After the first "round," call out math problems to the students in which the answers correspond to the students' numbers. For instance, you can call out "Twenty-four divided by six" and have the students assigned to the number 4 run.
- You may want to start the number assignments with 3 or 4 so that the math problems can be more difficult.
- Variation: You can assign the students any facts or figures in history that they should recognize or memorize and have them run when you ask questions. If they are the answer to the questions, they run to get the bag.
Have students work in teams to solve the problems and get the "bacon" first—you can call out problems that have multiple answers and have both sets of students play, ie. "Multiples of 6." Discuss what difficulties the students had when playing and what other variations they can think of to make the game more fast-paced.
Recognize which students get involved in the game as opposed to those that aren't as enthused about it. Which students always seem to win/lose? Do your kids prefer working in teams or by themselves?
