3-5 PE Lesson Ideas

This activity gives students the opportunity to practice — and test — their estimating skills. The teacher gives the students a set of distances to estimate, such as the following (which are used on the Take the Estimating Challenge worksheet):

How far is it across the gym from one basketball goal to the other?
How far is it from the free-throw line to the nearest bathroom?
How far is it from one end of the playground to the other?

Feel free to adapt this list for your school building.

Students estimate how many steps it will take to walk each distance and write their estimates on their worksheet. Then, students walk the distances and record the exact number of steps their pedometer registered.

Once students have both numbers, challenge them to figure out how close their estimates were by comparing the estimate to the actual steps they took. For example, if a student guessed it would take 100 steps to walk across the gym and the distance was actually only 85, the difference would be 15 steps. Have students record the differences on their worksheet.

Lastly, have students add up the differences for all scenarios. If you want to turn this into a game, have students compare their scores to see who had the lowest score. The student with the smallest number is the best estimator!