Most of the time when you have a program for parents in the elementary school it is comprised of speaking some lines and then singing a song. Or it might be speaking some liens and say a poem. Or it just might even be speak a few lines and sing a song and do a dance. It has been done over and over for many years and they are very enjoyable. It is fun and rewarding to all parents to see their child perform and shine in the spot light.

Having produced many of those programs and enjoyed everyone of them I do not want to do away with them, but I do want to see another type of program started. Last year I produced a program for a PE teacher who wanted to show the parents what their students were learning in PE. She wanted to do it as easy as possible and have fun in the mean time.

After producing my first PE program I learned a few things that will help others that want to do the same. First you do need a narrative to introduce each activity so that parents understand what the PE teacher is trying to accomplish with this specific skill or activity. It needs to be short and come before the activity. The narrative welcomes the audience and holds the program together and then tells them good-bye.

The next thing that the PE Program should do is use the skills that the PE teacher is teaching not add to their burden with other skills to stuff into their curriculum. The activities that are chosen should be fun for the participants and fun for the audience to watch.

The PE teacher being on the floor with a whistle as they are in PE class is very important. It is good for safety reasons and the teacher can monitor what is happening and change things as needed. This also gives the teacher a chance to see when it might be fun to invite the audience to come out on the floor for a few minutes and be involved in the activity and then send them back.

Having the audience participate is important, also. Just as in singing programs it is important to have an audience participation number so it is with the PE Program. Do not have the whole audience come out just invite a few.

Your gymnasium will determine how many students you can have participate. We found that we could sit one class of parents on the stage and use the whole gym floor. Because of this restriction we did three separate programs with three different classes on the same grade level.

Were the PE programs successful. Well the PE teacher tells me that the students are still talking about it a year later and want to do another one. And the current class is asking when they get to do the program because they have heard that it was so fun.

Fun is the key. The students, parents and teacher should have fun and if they do they you have yourself a successful program.