Physical Education With a Halloween Theme

Justin Cahill runs a great blog called Keeping Kids in Motion. One of the regular features of his blog is a monthly thematic challenge. Those challenges are accompanied by printable calendars and handouts for teachers. The challenges for this month are Trick or Treat, Move Your Feet, The Pumpkin Dice Latte Challenge, and The Fitness Spooktacle.

Trick or Treat, Move Your Feet is a kids fitness challenge for the month of October (adults can do it too). There is a downloadable calendar of little workouts that you can do with your students throughout the month of October. Each workout is represented by either a jack-o-lantern, a skull, or a bat.

When students complete the Fitness is Spooktacular challenge they can receive a certificate. Certificates are available for teachers to download and print for free from the Keeping Kids in Motion blog.

Applications for Education
Keeping Kids in Motion is a blog that's great for elementary school physical education teachers as well as anyone who is looking for ideas on how to encourage kids to stay physically fit. The blog is full of ideas that can be implemented across a school and not just in the gym.

Great Resources for Family Phys Ed Week

As I've mentioned in previous blog posts, I'm a big fan of OPEN Phys ED because they offer great lesson plans and other resources for getting kids active in more than just the traditional gym class activities that you and I did in school decades ago. OPEN Phys Ed seems to emphasize giving kids ways to develop fun exercise habits for life. To that end, OPEN Phys Ed recently published some new resources for Family PE Week 2022. 

Family PE Week is October 3rd through 7th this year. The goal of the week is to encourage families to be active together. OPEN Phys Ed has some free resources to help you help families reach that goal. The first of those resources is a chart of Family PE Week at-home challenges. Those challenges include things like having a dance party, taking a walk, and playing a fun game like Bowling for Cups. The complete chart is available as a PDF, Word doc, and Google Doc for you to copy. On this page you'll also find a template for a letter to send home to explain what Family PE Week is and the challenges for the week. 

If you'd like to extend Family PE Week or you have students whose parents are looking for some more fun exercises to do at home, point them to the bottom of the Family PE Week page where there are more than a dozen suggested activities with directions.

Paper, Programming, and Games - The Week in Review

Good morning from Maine where it feels like spring this morning. The wind is blowing away the clouds of yesterday and it should be a sunny day to play outside. We're going to put on our boots and go for a little hike this today. I hope that you do something fun outside today too. 

This week I held a follow-up Zoom meeting for folks who participated in my webinar about how to create and sell digital products. I also held a webinar for a fun little group of librarians. If you'd like to have me host a webinar for your group, please send me an email at richardbyrne (at) freetech4teachers.com. 

Next week Rushton Hurley and I will resume our Two EdTech Guys Take Questions series, register here to join us for that free event. 

These were the week's most popular posts:
1. Try This New Google Chrome Feature
2. Seven Sites and Apps to Help Students Learn Coding and Programming
3. Plays.org - Educational Games Your Students Will Love to Play
4. A Huge Collection of Resources for Fun Phys Ed Activities
5. Spaghetti Trees and the History of April Fools' Day
6. Stop Printing the Internet
7. Chronicling America - A Great Place to Find Historic Newspapers

Summer Workshops for Your School!
I'm going back on the road this summer to host professional development workshops in-person! If you'd like to have me come to your school, please get in touch with me soon.

Spring and Summer Webinars
I conduct professional development webinars throughout the year. I'll host a free one-hour webinar for any school or group that purchases ten or more copies of 50 Tech Tuesday Tips.

On-demand Professional Development

• Search Strategies Students Need to Know
• A Crash Course in Making & Teaching With Video
• A Crash Course in Google Earth & Maps for Social Studies

Other Places to Follow Me:

• The Practical Ed Tech Newsletter comes out every Sunday evening/ Monday morning. It features my favorite tip of the week and the week's most popular posts from Free Technology for Teachers.
• My YouTube channel has more than 40,000 subscribers watching my short tutorial videos on a wide array of educational technology tools. 
• I've been Tweeting as @rmbyrne for fifteen years. 
• The Free Technology for Teachers Facebook page features new and old posts from this blog throughout the week. 
• If you're curious about my life outside of education, you can follow me on Instagram or Strava.

This post originally appeared on FreeTech4Teachers.com. If you see it elsewhere, it has been used without permission. Sites that steal my (Richard Byrne's) work include Icons Daily and Daily Dose. Featured image captured by Richard Byrne.

How to Collect and Organize Images in Google Classroom

A friend of mine who teaches phys ed had the idea to have his students submit pictures as evidence of doing phys ed activities at home. He asked me for advice on how to best collect and organize those pictures. I recommended posting the assignment in Google Classroom and collecting the images that way. In the following video I demonstrate how that process looks from the perspective of a teacher and from the perspective of a student.



This process can be used for collecting any kind of file that you want to request from your students. For example, you could collect and organize video files and audio files this way. I only used image files in the demonstration because that's what I was specifically asked about.

TeachPhysEd- A Great Library of Videos Demonstrating Phys Ed Lessons

TeachPhysEd is a website and YouTube channel maintained by Coach Benjamin Pirillo. On his YouTube channel Coach Pirillo demonstrates and explains activities for physical education teachers to use in their classrooms. I've watched half a dozen of the videos and have been impressed by his explanations of the rationale for the formatting of the activities and cross-curricular inclusion. Embedded below you can see the latest TeachPhysEd video and my favorite cross-curricular TeachPhysEd activity (yes, the choice reveals my social studies background).

How Igloos Can Keep You Warm - And Winter Phys Ed Activities

How an Igloo Keeps You Warm is a new video from It's Okay To Be Smart. The video does a great job of explaining how an igloo provides insulation and stays relatively warm when people are inside it. The video also explains the engineering concepts used in the creation of a strong and warm igloo.


Winter is a tough time to get outside and exercise. But if you have some fun activities planned, it is a little bit easier to go outside. Here are some fun and somewhat educational activities to do in the snow.

NOVA, as part of their program on Denali, has directions for building a snow cave and directions for building an Igloo. (If you do either of these activities, make sure that you closely supervise students. A collapsed snow cave or igloo can be very dangerous).

Boys' Life offers a list of outdoor winter games as well as directions for building igloos and snow shelters.

Making your own snowshoes is an activity that can be done indoors with the final product enjoyed outdoors. Mother Earth News offers directions for making your own snowshoes. How Cast has video directions for making an emergency pair of snowshoes.


When I was about seven or eight I was given a copy of The American Boy's Handy Book. That book is filled with fun hands-on indoor and outdoor activities including an entire section devoted to snow forts and other snow-related activities.