This guest post is by Patricia Sarmiento. You know how I love math and I am tickled to incorporate math into my summer pool times.
4 Math
Activities for the Pool
Don’t get
me wrong, summertime should definitely be action-packed and fun for the kids.
But I’ve never been one to pass up a great learning opportunity, and time at
the pool provides many. First, it’s a great time to teach your kids about water
safety as they strengthen their swim skills. If you’re looking for information
on pool safety, this all-in-one
guide on recreational swimming safety is a great place to start.
Then,
there are also the many learning-based
pool games. What’s great is that many of them are so much fun that
the kids don’t even realize they’re playing an educational game. Here are a few
math-based games that I played with my kids last summer, and that I’ll
definitely be trying out again this year:
Swimming
Pool Math Toss. From BlissfullyDomestic.com, this
is a great game to play with elementary school-age children. Buy a few plastic
Frisbees and sponges. Write numbers on the backs of the Frisbees and
corresponding equations on sponges. Then, put the Frisbees in the pool and have
the kids toss the sponges at the correct Frisbees. If the kids are older, you
can use more challenging equations or larger numbers.
Fishing
Fun! This is a fantastic multi-subject lesson. It prompts you
to take the kids pretend fishing at the pool. Make your own fishing poles using
string, sticks, and paper clips and have the kids go fishing. Use the worksheet
provided by ProjectWild.org to help the kids imagine what kind of fish they
might catch. When they do catch something, have them “measure” what they’ve
caught by using the fish on the worksheet.
In addition to being a creative thinking and math lesson,
it is a great opportunity to teach your kids about how to be safe around ponds,
lakes, streams, and other natural bodies of water.
Math-driven
Swim Lesson. Academy Swim Club offers several ways to turn
your kids’ swim lessons into math lessons. For example, you might ask them to
swim a path in a certain shape or ask them to swim x + y number of laps.
Connecting their swim lessons to math concepts is a great way to challenge
their minds as they become stronger swimmers.
Swimming
Pool. From the
University of Cambridge, you can either use the provided diagram to use this
lesson on a rainy day or use the actual steps of a pool. It comes with several
questions for you to ask your “students” to help you guide them through the
lesson. The activity offers a fun way to help younger kids work on counting and
to introduce them to negative numbers. It also offers a nice opportunity to
discuss with young children the safest ways to enter the pool.
I want my kids to experience learning during the
summer, but because swimming is such a valuable skill, I also want them to
spend as much time as possible becoming stronger swimmers. With these
activities, they can do both.
Patricia Sarmiento is a health and fitness blogger. A former high school and college
athlete, she loves writing about health, wellness, fitness, and other
health-related topics. She and her family make living an active lifestyle a
constant goal. They live in Maryland.
Photo
credit: Via Flickr – by flattop341
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