Football Unit Schedule and Lesson Plan

I left Thursday blank, but Sam talked about tackling and logo/uniform design that day.

I wondered if there would be enough "school-y" stuff to fill up this week, but there was more than enough! We could have easily taken another week, even with as basic as we were being about most things.

For our study of physics, we used this website extensively--we thought all the videos were quite good, and three of them reinforced Newton's laws (which we were putting most of our focus on) very well. This website, while over-detailed in places (for our purposes), was helpful as I prepared.

We made this bottle accelerometer as we were talking about acceleration. And the boys were even more delighted with the old swing-a-bucket-full-of-water-in-a-vertical-circle trick. (Ha, I couldn't think of a more elegant way to say that!) They re-created the demonstration over and over during their free time that day! :)

This was an interesting video.

The boys thought this was really fun: we took these NFL team logos and tried to match them to their teams. Some were easy, but a few were surprisingly hard.

Then we printed out the logos and looked up the location of each team, so we could paste their logos in the correct place on this map:

As far as actual football rules, the boys' favorite element was probably learning how the offense tries to disguise the moment of the snap using the snap count. They never got tired of calling out "5, 5, 3, 15, 27, Monkey, BANANA!" (and so on) as they hiked the ball. They also really liked filling out the position worksheet I made:

(answer key)

My favorite thing we did was playing memory game with the referee signals. I printed out the signals and their meanings here. I just picked out the most common ones, and cut out the pictures only. I glued them onto index cards, and then wrote the words to match. Like this:

Even Malachi had a lot of fun playing this game, and Daisy liked going around the room with her hands in the air yelling "Touchdown!"

When this unit was over we went to our local high school football game, which was really fun. In some ways I think it's easier to see what's going on in high school ball, since they don't move as fast as the college and pro players! Plus, the stadium lights went off mid-game, so we got to sit in the dark for 20 minutes while they figured out how to turn them back on, which was very exciting and the kids liked it. :)