[Childcare] Sports Day activity ideas. Let’s make the Sports Day exciting!
Sports days at nursery schools and kindergartens are important events where everyone can see how the children are growing!
By preparing fun activities, you can create a sports day that both children and adults will enjoy.
Here, we’ll introduce a variety of events: those done cooperatively as a class, activities for younger children, and games that parents and children can participate in together!
All of them are ideas that motivate children and allow guardians to feel their children’s development.
Use these as a reference to tailor activities to the children and create a fun and engaging sports day!
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- [Preschool] Fun event ideas to include in the sports day for the junior (younger) class
- [Senior Class Events] A collection of game ideas to liven up a sports day for 5-year-olds
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- [Childcare] Unique event ideas to try at a sports day
[Childcare] Sports day event ideas. Let’s make the sports day exciting! (91–100)
Soran Bushi
Soran Bushi is popular with both children and adults for its powerful, heroic, and crisply disciplined movements, which are also a hallmark of Japanese tradition.
The graceful motions of the hands and arms that depict waves, along with the dynamic, forceful gestures that portray bold fishermen, create a beautiful contrast between stillness and motion.
Highlights include children running around the schoolyard with big “bountiful catch” flags and everyone shouting out the calls together.
Their earnest dedication to the performance is both endearing and strong.
It’s a piece that moves parents to the core as they witness each child’s growth.
A circuit of hula hoops and mats
This is an idea to set up hula hoops and mats outdoors to create a circuit.
For the areas with hula hoops, move forward while hopping like hopscotch.
For the areas with mats, move forward by doing forward rolls or rolling along.
Please have a teacher on standby to assist and to make sure no one falls off the mats.
You can also include three-dimensional mats, such as triangular ones.
Try arranging them as equipment to walk across like a balance beam or to climb over.
Hula hoop relay
This is a relay where two people run together inside a hula hoop.
Mark the start line and the turnaround point, divide into several teams, and at the starting signal, each team’s first pair runs.
They go around the turnaround point, return to the start, and pass the hula hoop to the next pair.
The team whose last pair gets back to the start first wins! If you don’t match your speeds, you might lose balance and fall, so go at the fastest pace you can manage together.
At the turnaround point, it helps to have the person on the inside act as the pivot to turn smoothly!
mat exercises
This activity uses mats—often strongly associated with cushioning during exercise—as tools for play.
Through games that involve moving heavy mats, participants can also enjoy the experience of working together.
Let them feel the weight of the mats in various ways, such as games where they tug mats against each other or compete to flip them over as quickly as possible.
The fewer people there are, the more strength is needed to move a mat, which not only helps them sense the weight but also appreciate the importance of cooperation.
marching drill
At preschools and kindergartens where children regularly play musical instruments, adding a marching drill to the sports day program is highly recommended.
While playing percussion and wind instruments, the children move in various directions—up, down, left, and right—and form different formations.
It can be challenging because they have to do many things at once, but it’s perfect for cheering and energizing the event.
It might be a good idea to recruit volunteers—children who take music lessons, belong to a marching team, or simply want to give it a try.
Racquetball Balancing Relay
As an event that uses equipment, we also recommend a racket-and-ball relay.
In this activity, participants place a ball on a tennis or badminton racket and run straight to the finish line.
The fun part is that while you want to run fast, if you go too quickly you’ll drop the ball.
We hope participants enjoy not only the race itself but also the process of trying repeatedly and figuring out how to carry the ball well.
There’s no fixed type of ball, but something light and not too large works best.
Deploy! Ninja Squad
This is an obstacle course recommended for 2-year-olds, where children pretend to be ninjas and overcome obstacles.
Becoming a ninja helps motivate them, right? First, they jump off a vaulting box, then hang from a horizontal bar.
After that, they touch a sound-making shuriken shape to reach the goal.
It can also be fun to add more ninja-like activities depending on what you can set up at the time, such as crawling through a tunnel or under a net.
After this event, adding a ninja dance segment could create consistency and make the program even more appealing.
