Learning Activities with Fidget Spinners

July 6, 2017 by Sarah White Leave a Comment

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?

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Celebrate Inventor’s Day by Learning about Inventors

Several countries have a day set aside to honor and recognize their inventors, but Nov. 9 is a special one that’s known as Tag der Erfinder in German. It’s celebrated in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and it falls on Nov. 9 because that’s the birthday of Hedy Lamarr.

Hedy Lamarr is widely known as an actress but there’s a lot more to her story. You can get a little of it geared to little kids in the Little People, Big Dreams book Hedy Lamarr (32 pages, hardcover, published 2023 by Frances Lincoln Childrens Books, suggested retail price $15.99).

The book explores her birth in Austria and how she spent time when she was young coming up with inventions. She became an actress, married an arms dealer, made her escape to America and became an actress again.

But she also helped develop a frequency-hopping signal device for airplanes that was used by the Americans and their allies during World War II. That technology became the basis for wireless technology such as wifi and GPS.

While Inventor’s Day is a great time to learn about Hedy Lamarr, you can take this opportunity to check out books and do little studies on lots of different inventors. If there’s an inventor or an invention your child is particularly interested in, that’s a great place to start. It’s fun to think about all the things we use every day that didn’t always exist; someone had to invent them!

For a start here at Craft Gossip you can learn more about Garrett Morgan, who invented traffic lights; Maria Oroso, who developed a clay oven that could cook food without electricity; and more female inventors and scientists.

And for more general inventors’ fun, check out this inventors word search from Fun Findery (and another from Let’s Do Puzzles) or take a quiz on inventors and their inventions from Flanders Family Home Life.

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