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?

When my daughter was younger I would spend a lot of time trying to come up with activities she could do in the car on long road trips and things to entertain her when we were waiting at restaurants and things that didn’t involve screens.

But it turns out there are a lot of great activities you can do with just a piece of paper and a pen.

What Do We Do All Day has a great collection of pen and paper games, including some that can be done with just one person, though they’re all more fun if you have at least two.

There are some classics on here like hangman and dots and boxes, but there are also quite a few I hadn’t heard of before.

I don’t want to spoil the whole list for you because you should definitely click over there and look around, but I will share about the one that you see pictured above.

This game is called Bridges, and you start by making the big random shape and the dividing it into a bunch of sections (the post says 30-50 sections is ideal but I think this one is smaller than that).

Each player gets their own color marker and you take turns drawing bridges from one space to another, crossing a third. Once there’s a bridge, no other bridges can start, end or cross in those spaces. Keep going until no more bridges can be built, and the person who makes the last bridge wins.

Check out the post over at What We Do All Day for more great ideas for no or almost-no prep games you can play with your kids or that kids can play together. I’d love to know if you have a favorite paper and pen game, whether it’s on this list or a different one.

[Photo: What We Do All Day]

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