A Huge Collection of Resources for Fun Phys Ed Activities

OPEN Phys Ed is an organization that hosts tons of great resources for physical education teachers. Additionally, OPEN organizes initiatives to encourage students to participate in physical education activities. One of those initiatives is National Field Day. 

OPEN National Field Day is an initiative that runs through May and June. It has a social media element that you can participate in to win prizes. If you don't want to participate in the social media component, you can still use the dozens of resources that are associated with OPEN National Field Day. 

Applications for Education
On the OPEN National Field Day site you'll find PDFs, Word docs, Google Docs, and videos that provide instructions for dozens of activities that your students can do as part of your own field day or as part of a regular physical education class. There are individual and team activities included in the catalog of activities. 

What I appreciate about the activities on the OPEN National Field Day site is that, for the most part, the activities are not what I would call "traditional" sports activities. Take a look at the Paper Plane Cornhole game or the the Tennis Shoe Tower game for examples of some of the nontraditional games you'll find for OPEN National Field Day. 

Make a Word Game With Google Sheets - A Fun Way to Learn About Formulas

Google's Applied Digital Skills website is a good place to find lesson plans and activities that you can use to help students learn how to use many features of Google Workspace tools. To capitalize on the recent trend of word games like Wordle, Google recently published a new Applied Digital Skills lesson called Make a Word Game. 

Make a Word Game is a lesson in which students collaborate in Google Sheets to develop word game that utilizes functions and formulas to randomly generate letters that are used in a word game. Furthermore, students learn how to use functions and formulas to generate scoring for their games. Students don't need to have prior experience using spreadsheets in order to complete this lesson. However, a little prior experience will definitely help avoid some frustration. 

Applications for Education
Google provides some extension activities that students can complete to further develop their spreadsheet skills. Before doing those extension activities I would have students repeat the process of the lesson and modify their input to try to create a thematic version of the word game.

If you're unfamiliar with Google's Applied Digital Skills lessons, here's a short video in which I demonstrate how to access the lessons and distribute them via Google Classroom.