Learning Activities with Fidget Spinners

Fidget spinners do not seem to be going away. My daughter is doing summer camp classes at her school and she came home last week with a DIY fidget spinner, and I’m still seeing a lot of projects for making and using these toys.

So why not use them in learning activities?

Making your own fidget spinner would be a great place to start. There are some options in the link above, but Red Ted Art probably has the most different ideas, and printable templates you can use to make your own.

Once you have a spinner or two, what to do with them?

Tot Schooling has some fun ideas for fidget spinner challenges that can be used to help kids with sight words, letters and numbers, and there’s a blank printable page you can fill in with other challenges. Maybe a physical challenge like do five jumping jacks, touch your toes five times and so on, see how far you can get before the spinner stops.

You could also use the spinner as a timer. How many words can your child read, or how many math problems can they do, before the spinner runs out? This is another good place to work in physical activity — keep moving until the spinner stops!

Though this isn’t strictly educational, teaching kids to clean up after themselves and do their chores is important, too. So why not play beat the spinner while your kid cleans up their room? Or make a spinner chore chart? Mark one of the arms, then the child has to do whatever chore the spinner lands on. Check out this one from We Are Far from Normal, which has other ideas for using spinners to help with the chores, and printable pie charts you can fill in with chores.

Do you do things beyond just spinning your fidget spinners? I’d love to hear about it. Looking for more resources? Check out these board games for learning Math and Multiplication?

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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