Melisa Gaines: Sports Week

Last week I shared how the kids and I are going to focus on a theme each week this summer to learn by playing, reading, crafting, and having fun. We enjoyed learning about butterflies last week and this week decided to focus on sports. Because of the vastness of information and ideas on the internet (what did moms do before they had internet?), I had a hard time deciding whether to do one sport for a whole week, a different sport each day, or just mix all of the sports together and do some each day. We mixed it all up, so I have posted our activities here in order of how we did them.

1. First, we went to the dollar tree and purchased these balls (football and soccer) to play with and also found some magic towels (football and baseball). The kids thought this was the most awesome science experiment ever!

balls from the Dollar Tree

2. Next, we colored this football page FOUND HERE

3. Using this lacing project idea, I used white card stock to draw a circle for a baseball, hole-punched the design of baseball threads on the sides, and gave each child some red yarn to thread through the holes to make their baseballs. I put tape on the ends of the yarn to make them shoestring-like.

4. We then learned the "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" song and used this source to sing along... Kididdles. And listened to the national anthem here, since it is sung at many sporting events.

5. Coloring this baseball picture was fun and it saved printer ink since we could color it on the computer. We also colored this hockey picture, and golf picture.

6. I used the football picture in #2 as a template to trace onto poster board and cut out four shapes. The kids decorated their footballs, and then I assisted them in stapling the edges of two of the football shapes (each) together and they stuffed them with left over newspaper and completed stapling.

7. It was so fun to print off these kids and dress them up as basketball players and soccer players!

8. After storytime at the library, we chose books to go along with our sports theme to bring home and enjoy.

9. I love how the blog "2 teaching mommies" always come up with these great preschool and toddler packs related to different themes. We used parts of the football unit and baseball unit.

10. My three year old is just getting in to coloring by number, so I printed this baseball coloring page for her and this basketball coloring page for my two year old son.

11. No sports week is complete without actually playing the sports, so we went outside to enjoy some fun with balls.

12. Gymnastics is one of my kids favorite sports and we have a fun mat they like to roll around on.

13. I bought this bowling set at Toys R Us around Christmas for only $3. We are missing some of the pins because they are pretty flimsy. We set it up in the foyer and learned how to hold the ball and roll it into the pins.

14. This idea is all over mom blogs, and I'm so glad because the kids thought it was so much fun. We found fly swatters at Walmart for 98 cents each and had some balloons on hand to blow up for a game of tennis.