Your young learners will discover how muscular strength and endurance can increase with this truly hands-on activity! Beginning by writing an acrostic for the word strength, class members then engage in tracking their ability to squeeze a clothespin with their non-dominant hands over the course of two weeks, recording both their predictions and actual results. They then graph their performance data and evaluate their progress together as a class, and conclude by writing a new acrostic for strength designed with their recent discoveries in mind.

This is the second resource in a series of fitness and physical activity lessons.

Concepts

acrostic poems, types of poetry, conditioning

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Additional Tags

acrostic, muscle strength, muscle endurance, conditioning, science

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Pros

• Simple, hands-on activity designed to explain an important concept
• Information learned through inquiry and discovery
• Cross-curricular activity that integrates scientific concepts, such as recording and graphing data, with physical education

Cons

• Instructor may wish to incorporate more detailed information regarding the science behind how conditioning improves strength and endurance
• Younger learners will need a lot of support on how to record data and track progress at home