Moana-Inspired Learning Activities

We don’t go to the movies that often, so we haven’t seen Moana, but I’m a huge Lin-Manuel Miranda fan so I’m super excited that he might win an Oscar for a song he wrote for that movie.

Of course Oscar season is not the only time you can use Moana-inspired learning activities, but it’s a fun reason to pull out the volcanoes, seashells and ocean study materials.

Bambini Travel has a nice collection of Moana-inspired learning activities including books, field trip ideas, creative invitations, a recipe and, of course, volcano activities.

This is such a fun idea, to tie your curriculum, or even just some fun activities you do at home, to a movie your kids already love. Crank up the soundtrack and have fun learning!

Do you have any favorite ocean, island or volcano activities? I’d love to hear about them.

[Photo via Bambini Travel.]

We highly recommend Amazon Prime for streaming. They are currently offering a 30-day free trial.

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.

Have you read?

Leave a Reply