Getting Through The PE Packet Without Losing Your Mind
Advantage Press produces a lot of these standardized physical education workbooks, and if you are a teacher or administrator trying to actually use them instead of letting them collect dust in a closet, there is a real process to it. The packets themselves are decent enough on paper, but the way they are organized does not match how a school year actually runs. You will spend more time fighting the format than teaching the content. Here is how it works in practice. The Advantage Press PE packet breaks units into weekly chunks, each with a student workbook page, an answer key, and some kind of assessment rubric. The problem is the rubrics are generic. They do not account for modified students, indoor space limitations, or the reality that you have 150 kids and twenty minutes between periods. I went through this three years ago when my district switched vendors and I spent about six weeks reformatting everything before I had anything usable. Now I know the shortcuts. Start by scanning every unit before you assign it. The first three units are usually fine as-is. Units four through six tend to reference equipment your school does not have or activities that require space you do not possess. I flag those pages immediately and prepare alternatives from the Teacher Resource section, which most people skip entirely. That section has substitute activities that actually work, but they are buried at the back of the manual and printed in a font size that makes them easy to overlook.
When it comes to grading, do not use the built-in rubric verbatim. It assigns point values that add up to strange numbers, like 47 points total with no clear scale. I collapse their rubric into a simple five-point scale per category and remap it to 100. This takes about ten minutes per unit and makes reporting to the administration infinitely easier. Your district's grading software will hate you if you hand in spreadsheets with irregular point totals. One edge case that tripped me up last fall: the packet includes a fitness testing section that assumes all students can participate in standard cardiovascular assessments. About a third of my students had IEP accommodations that required alternative measurements, and the packet provides exactly zero guidance for that. I worked around it by using the district's standard fitness test protocol as a parallel track, swapping in the Advantage Press lesson structure but replacing the data collection sheets with our own forms. It is not elegant, but it gets the job done without exposing anyone to liability. Download access is through the Advantage Press teacher portal, which requires a school email and an activation code found in the physical book. If you ordered digital-only, the codes are sometimes missing or expired. I have had to email their support team twice now and waited three business days each time for a replacement. Budget your timeline accordingly. Do not wait until the week before the unit starts to realize you cannot access the materials.
The answer keys are color-coded by unit, which is helpful, but they contain occasional errors. I caught a mismatch in Unit 5 where the answer key listed the correct heart rate zone for a 14-year-old as 140 to 170 bpm, which is technically accurate for maximum effort but completely inappropriate for the moderate-intensity activity described in the lesson. I corrected it with a red pen and moved on. Do not assume the answer key is infallible just because it is printed. If you are looking at this package for the first time, I would recommend spending an afternoon going through every page before you commit to using it for a full semester. The upside is real, but the friction is also real. The materials will save you time once you have customized them, but the customization step is non-negotiable. There is no way around it.
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