PE for 5th-8th grade is very fun for me to teach and the students seem to enjoy it as well.  This is the time where my students become more competitive with each other as well as themselves.  This is also when my students get to start changing clothes for PE, so that adds to the excitement!  A big focus of mine for 5th-8th grade PE is teamwork and cooperation.  For that reason, a lot of our time is spent on team sports. Another big focus of ours is FitnessGram.  FitnessGram is a set of health-related physical fitness tests based on scientific data of students around the country.  I typically test my students once in the fall, once in the winter, and one last time in the spring.  It is especially important that my students begin to take FitnessGram more seriously in the upper grades because once they enter high school, FitnessGram will be a part of their grade.  If you want to know more information regarding FitnessGram you can visit their website at http://www.cooperinstitute.org/fitnessgram.  Although FitnessGram and team sports take up a majority of our class curriculum, I feel very strongly that students need to see other avenues of physical fitness.  Every year I try to do some sort of dance unit as well as group fitness such as cardio kickboxing.  Overall, the most important goal is to find at least one activity that each student connects with and truly enjoys in order to encourage them to continue moving their bodies as they get older.