Football Learning Activities

If you live in a city with an NFL team or just like football, now is a great time to add some football themed learning activities into the mix ahead of the big game.

ABCs of Literacy has some cute football shaped letter printables you can use in a sensory bin, to practice letter recognition or spelling, hide around the room to make a scavenger hunt and more. The set includes upper case and lower case letters and worksheets for kids to mark which letters they found. They also have a color by letter printable with a football theme.

Rock Your Homeschool has a fun collection of football themed printables, including a maze and connect the dots, football helmet math, a writing activity and sequencing, among other things. You can also find a set of football themed Perler bead patterns including a football, trophy, jersey and helmet.

Speaking of helmets, Fantastic Fun and Learning has a set of helmet alphabet cards you can print to use for an alphabet scavenger hunt. The set includes a page you can laminate so kids can reuse it to practice tracing the letters they find.

Get out those dot markers and print off the designs from 3 Dinosaurs for an easy art and fine motor activity. The shapes include a football and a helmet with options made out of dots and those with dots on the shape. And you can get in some gross motor activity, too, with their printable activity dice with a football theme. These are perfect for getting some movement in when it’s too cold to go outside.

And if you have kids at home or in the classroom who love bingo, there are a couple of football themed bingo printables that I found. This one from Artsy Fartsy Mama has cute little icons of different penalties and football moves, so it’s perfect for kids who already know a little bit about the game. An easier one comes from The Best Ideas for Kids, which uses clip art of football themed icons and food to make a bingo.

Growing Up Ladybug and How to Become a Butterfly are both by Stepanka Sekaninova and illustrated by Linh Dao, and they came out at the same time and are on similar themes, so let’s look at them together.

Growing Up Ladybug is narrated by Mariella, a seven-spot ladybug. She talks about the parts of a ladybug, where they live, different kinds of ladybugs, why humans love them, their defenses against predators and the life cycle of a ladybug.

The drawings are cute if not always scientifically accurate, it’s not in such a way that’s likely to confuse kids (who probably already know that ladybug mamas don’t push their larval babies around in strollers, for instance.

It’s a good general description of the life cycle of a lady bug and why we like having them around.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Similarly, How to Become a Butterfly covers the life cycle of a butterfly, starting with caterpillars eating burning nettle leaves. (Here Amanda is the narrator.) The book talks about a few of the more than 18,000 daytime butterflies in the world as well as other creatures that live in the meadow (there’s that ladybug again, along with crickets, bees and other bugs).

It also covers some of the enemies of caterpillars like wasps and spiders, and the defenses that caterpillars use to try to prevent being eaten. It illustrates how caterpillars grow and change as they molt and prepare to pupate, and what a caterpillar looks like before and while it is forming its chrysalis. And while the book uses the word metamorphasis it doesn’t really talk about what happens between the caterpillar forming a chrysalis and the butterfly hatching.

This butterfly is a peacock butterfly, and once it hatches the book covers the parts of a butterfly and the life cycle. It also talks about nocturnal moths (though it says nocturnal butterflies are “usually called moths” when moths are actually a different species) and what butterflies do at night.

I’m maybe a little hard on this book because my daughter is a butterfly expert from way back, but it is still cute and good for the very basic basics of the butterfly life cycle.

Both books would be fun additions to your bookshelf for younger kids starting to learn about different animals or who have an interest in insects.

About the book: 32 pages, hardcover. Published 2026 by Albatross Media. Suggested retail price $16.95.

Have you read?

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