Learning Activities Using Pool Noodles

Pool noodles seem to be everywhere in the summer — even the grocery store and the dollar store — and while they’re fun to play with in the pool they’re also an interesting material to use in your learning activities.

A Dab of Glue Will Do has rounded up a bunch of great activities you can do with pool noodles to help kids learn through the summer and beyond. Use them to learn fractions, build a marble run (pictured, that activity is from Frugal Fun 4 Boys), for spelling, fine-motor activities and more.

These would also be great fun to do when it’s cold outside, to bring a bit of more summery fun into your learning activities (and of course pool noodles go on sale at the end of the season, too).

Check out the full roundup at A Dab of Glue Will Do.

[Photo: Frugal Fun 4 Boys, via A Dab of Glue Will Do.]

With little kids especially, linking learning to physical activity really does help them learn. Movement can help kids focus, and it just keeps them from sitting still all day, which isn’t good for anyone.

The good news is lots of different learning activities can be adopted to get kids moving while they learn, so let’s look at some math and number activities that use gross motor skills.

Probably the most obvious thing would be hopscotch, which helps kids count while they hop. You can also mix up the numbers, do skip counting with the numbers, give kids a simple math problem and have them hop to the correct answer, and on and on.

This number hop game from Gift of Curiosity is a more chaotic version, with number flash cards on the floor that kids can hop, skip or jump to as you call them out (this one is more for individual number identification than counting). It’s a great indoor option if it’s too hot, cold or rainy out to do traditional hopscotch, too.

This painter’s tape number line idea from Days with Grey doesn’t involve quite as much movement, but kids can move around while they place things on the number line and work on learning about one to one correspondence. In the blog post they use shoes, but you can count anything you’ve got handy. (Be warned when I visited this website had an ad that continually took up the whole page, but you can get the idea pretty quickly.)

One of the important tasks of learning numbers is learning a parent’s phone number just in case it’s ever needed, or how to dial 911 in case on an emergency. Teaching Mama has a great way to practice telephone numbers and get some movement in with a giant telephone keypad made out of paper plates. You can also use this for counting practice, but it’s a great idea for learning phone numbers, too.

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