It is hard to know when the muse will hit. Sometimes it takes me weeks to come up with a premise for a game. Other times I think of a game pretty quickly, but once I implement the lesson in PE, it’s a flop. Back to the drawing board. Then every once in a while I create a lesson from scratch in ten minutes before the class starts, and it is an immediate hit. Cardiovascular System Kickball is one of those instant success stories.
Who doesn’t love kickball?
While watching students at recess play kickball, I was inspired to go back to an old idea that I had for a game about blood flowing through the heart and lungs. I had made a game years ago and never got around to writing the lesson plan for it. Part of the reason I did not write the lesson was because I never really thought it worked well enough on its own. The students liked it, but it was far from one of their favorite games. The game was overly complicated, and I didn’t think it was as effective as it should be. However, the main idea from the game I loved was following the path of blood as it went through the right atrium, then right ventricle, off to the lungs, and then back to the heart for the left atrium, and finally the left ventricle, where it pumped to the rest of the body. Having the students follow this path was an idea that I wanted to keep and implement in a better way, and it dawned on me when I was watching a game of kickball.
Funny enough, I am gearing up to teach different bat and ball sports with my lower elementary students, which include rounders and pesapallo, and thinking about these games inspired me to make the base path for our Cardio Kickball game resemble the path of blood in the heart! This was the breakthrough I was looking for, so i quickly switched the activity we were going to do that day and tried out this new Cardiovascular Kickball game. After running it with five different classes, they all absolutely loved it! Even the students who are not the fastest or can kick the hardest can still be very good in this version.
I have posted the lesson plan in the Free lessons section. Give it a download, try it with your students, and let me know if they love it as much as my students do!