Winter seems to have arrived with a vengeance and along with it chesty coughs and runny noses. So, what do you do with two sick kids when it is bitterly cold outside, you go bowling of course. Now, before anyone yells at me for exposing other kids to our sick germs, this kind of bowling doesn’t even require you to leave the house, all you need is a bunch of stuff from around the house to stack, some balls and a passageway.
Bowling is a great active task for building on your kid’s visual sense as it involves stacking objects (of the same or different sizes and shapes) and then knocking them over with a ball thus involving both Visual Acuity and Visual Perception (you can read more about this here).
Just a few of the items and balls that we found to use.
Some of the objects we found to stack were:
• Leftover paper drinking cups
• Pots and pans from the kitchen
• Tupperware
• Wooden blocks
Other items you could use for your bowling alley
• Empty formula tins
• Empty cooldrink bottles
Get your kids to stack and build their towers at one end of the passage.
Let them take turns in knocking their towers down. You can change the size of the balls or the distance between them and the tower depending on their ages and how challenging you want the activity to be.
The pots were their favourite… it seems the more noise their towers made coming down the more fun they had!
While simply stacking and knocking over will satisfy younger kids, to grade this activity for your older children you can get skittles of different sizes and get them to stack them from bigger to smaller first. You can also grade the size of the ball. Knocking down a tower is easy with a large ball, a bit more difficult with a tennis ball and even more difficult with a golf ball (make sure you aren’t near any windows before you let them hurl a golf ball around though).
This is also a great indoor activity for a rainy day or it can just as easily be set up outside too (you might have to do a bit more running around to fetch balls though).