"Wreck-it Ralph" for Elementary PE

Let's wreck things PE Nation!

We turn a simple throwing drill into a Wreck-It Ralph game that hooks K–2 and scales to older grades with smart rules, roles, and safety. Clear setups, rebuild roles, and distance tweaks keep the action fast while teaching form, teamwork, and boundaries.

• using a movie theme to boost engagement
• safe setup with midline and mat buffers
• roles for Wreck-It Ralphs and Fix-It Felixes
• rotation timing for fairness and flow
• throwing cues and age-based distances
• rebuild rules and defend-from-distance guidance
• scoring options: continuous play vs timed wins
• modifications for grades 3–5
• PDF visual guide available in the show notes

Grab the PDF in the show notes to go through the steps and levels and just get a visual of it as well

Take care and teach on,

Dave

-Wreck-it Ralph PDF

-Kindergarten PE Games and Activities ebook ($3.99 for 10 activities)

-Check out supersizedphysed.com for more resources, including free PDFs, articles, and courses to help with your PE program. Please leave a review to help grow this podcast and keep pushing our profession forward.

-Team Building Games Ebook (with preview): https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Team-Building-Games-and-Activities-for-PE-Class-14063095

-Free resources include Substack and Medium articles with PE tips, games, and strategies

-High Fives and Empowering Lives  book available as an ebook or paperback

-Paperback or download: HERE

-Amazon Ebook: HERE

Chapters

• 0:10 Welcome and Topic Intro
• 0:45 Why Wreck-It Ralph Works for PE
• 1:36 Theme Matters for Younger Grades
• 2:35 Gear You’ll Need
• 3:04 Field Setup and Midline
• 4:34 Roles: Wreckers and Fix-It Felixes
• 5:36 Safety Zones and Defending
• 6:35 Boundaries, Ball Return, and Flow
• 7:05 Game Variations and Scoring
• 7:50 Pyramids, Safety Reminders, and Wrap

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:10

Hello and welcome to the Super Size Foot Head podcast. My name is Dave, and today I want to talk about Wreck It Ralph, one of my favorite movies, but also one of my favorite games, especially for the younger, like K1, K2 uh students. So let's talk about it. Here we go. Welcome NPE Nation. So yes, I really like Racket Ralph. The first one. You know, the second one was okay, I guess. Uh now that my kids are older, teenagers, I haven't watched these movies as much recently, but once in a while, you know, late at night, they'll be on, and I'll just turn on these uh, you know, Pixar Disney movies. And I really like Racket Ralph. I really do. So I created this game a long time ago, uh, another one just like Space Battle that I put out recently, and I apologize on the audio of Space Battle. I don't know what happened, why the boomers weren't there. I might redo it at some point, but I don't want to take the whole episode down. So if you heard that and the audio was a little weird on the transitions and stuff, I apologize. I'm not sure what happened because I went back and looks fine. So uh again, not sure what happened, but I uh again apologize for that. So Wreck It Ralph is a fun game, um, especially if you call it Wreck It Ralph, you know, anything with themes in it, or you know, games with certain names, or you you know, anything can be, especially with kindergarten first and second. I mean, anything can be fun or different if you just instead of like tennis balls, they're like, you know, um infinity stones, or they're you know, just different things like that, or they're uh jelly beans or treasure or whatever, not just tennis balls, but anything you use, if you make them fun and you make the theme fun, it's a fun game. Now, with Record Ralph, there's different levels, and it's I think it's a lot of fun. I do, it's one of those games that I haven't played in a while, but I plan on bringing it back this year. It's just I'm going through my old games and I'm like, oh man, that was fun. Let's do that. And you could grab the PDF in the show notes to go through the steps and levels and just get a visual of it as well. That will be again in the show notes. So, Wreck It Ralph, here's what you need: you need a lot of uh gator skin balls, dodgeballs, whatever you want to call them, and bucket stacks, like the cup stacking, but then you need the buckets. Now, I guess you could use regular buckets, I guess like from Lowe's or whatever. But these, you know, regular buckets, like speed stack buckets, are probably the way to go because of their, I don't know, the way they're built and the way they um stack and the way they well will fall down. So to set up, what I do is I put uh a building area of like three colors per team. So with the buckets I have, and if you have bucket stacks, you probably have the main uh primary colors, I guess. So let's say it's purple, blue, and red on one side, six buckets each, and they're spread out into two like building areas, uh, not too far from like a midline. So I'll put a midline out there um of cones if you're playing in the field, or if you're playing on uh cement, like I do sometimes, or like a you know, basketball court or even in the gymnasium, just a midline, and then it depends on the grade level how far back you want to put the buckets in like the building zone because of uh the strength of throws from the students, you know, how far the kindergarten is obviously closer, first and second gets a little further away. And I play this with the older grades as well. Um, you know, you can. It's not maybe as it's more geared toward K1 and 2, maybe 3, but you can play with four and five, fourth, and fifth, definitely. You just have to modify the the distance and things like that and some of the rules. So again, the setup is three colors on one side, three colors on the other. I forgot what colors I just said. So let's say uh I think I remembered. So the other side would be like uh orange, red, and yellow, I think. I don't even know what I said, but basically three colors on each side, or blue or whatever I forgot. And you know, you have one team on one side, one team on the other. You have different uh jobs then for each uh student. You could be a thrower or you could be a you could be fix it felix, and because there's three stacks, I usually have three uh fix-it Felixes, where if a bucket or stack is knocked down, they fix it. Just like in the movie, there's fix the Felix, and there's Wreck It Ralph and other characters as well, of course. So the Wreck It Ralphs are the ones trying to knock down the towers, and just by demonstrating good throwing motion, um obviously go over the cues of throwing with them, um, especially the younger students, and they're trying to aim for the towers. If a tower gets knocked down, or even a bucket gets knocked down, the fix at Felix is put it back up. And that's really it. And with the younger students, you just go for a few minutes, maybe take a break, and then uh switch fix at Felix's and uh you know, or you can make it a like yeah, like a time thing, you know, three minutes and just keep rebuilding, keep throwing. And of course, we remind um our students that you're not throwing at each other, you're throwing at the towers. So there's no elimination here, there's nothing like that. And what I originally did was put them on mats, like big gymnastic mats, so that you they understand the fix of Felixes. They had to stand a certain area um to rebuild, and they couldn't block from like they couldn't stand like right next to the so I'm talking about the buckets, the building area was on a on big gymnastic mats, so they couldn't go inside that area until it fell down because they can't stand right up next to it in case they get hit or it falls on top of them. We don't want that to happen. So they had a there's an area of building and um an area where they can stand to defend. And you can change this up however you want. As always, you can modify the games as needed. You could have less or more uh gator skin balls, you can have people go across and get them. I usually don't. I say if it's on your side, you can go uh have some people be the gatherers, and then on the other side, like you can't go to the other person's side, the other team's side. You have to stay on your side, and you know, you can gather as you need, and uh, but you cannot cross the line when you throw. You bet you have to stay on your side. So it works on boundaries as well, especially with the younger students that are just learning the boundaries. Another modification with um again, a little bit older students, not kindergarten, is that whoever has the most, let's say again, you do a three-minute game and you can't rebuild. Or you can rebuild up to about two minutes left. And then you could say, okay, fit fix the Felix's, you can't rebuild anymore. And then at the end of three minutes, whichever team has the most standing wins. So there are other ways to do it. Or even you could just say you can keep building to the end and still make that rule. Whoever has the most standing at the end wins. And you know, it just adds that layer of uh the time element, the uh you gotta hurry, you gotta hurry. Come on, fix it at Felixes, you gotta get going. Or you could add two fix-it felixes to make it faster with the younger students uh that just take a little longer to build the towers. And as a reminder, when I'm I didn't say this before, but what I'm talking about, towers, I'm talking about with the pyramid-looking towers with a three on the bottom, then two, then one of each color. So it's a simple game, it's a fun game, and the kid the students really like it. We just have to be careful of the buckets falling. I've never had a student get hurt by a bucket falling because I have a the building area um just back a little bit where they can't get uh where they can't block it. Um the fix of Felix is they can't be too close to it. They're close, they can kind of stop it. Like if you see a ball in the air, they can knock it down, they can catch it, but they they're not close enough where they're getting they would get hurt by a bucket. So yeah, that's I mean, that's fix of Felix. So um I'm not gonna even do a couple of day again. I haven't done the one in a while, but I'd say grab the PDF in the show notes so you can see a visual of it and just have it if you want to show it to your students. And that is it, my friends, of PE Nation. Uh, you take care, have a great day, week, weekend, whenever you're listening to this, and let's keep pushing our profession forward.