Tumbling Activities

Tumbling is a form of gymnastics that can be practiced by gymnastics students of any age. However, because students who have been studying gymnastics for enough time to be experienced typically can exercise on their own with an individual routine, ideas for tumbling activities for a classroom of younger gymnastics students are in high demand. While all tumbling activities require physical participation by all students, some activities even exercise the coordination of a child's mind along with her body.

  1. Freeze Frame

    • Freeze Frame is a classroom gymnastics game that divides students equally between five stations of tumbling exercises placed side-by-side. The activities are as follows: hurdle over folded mats, hop scotch through nine hula hoops, jump onto and off of a vault horse, crawl through an obstacle course, and jump back and forth over a balance beam. Play music while the students go through their respective activity; when they music stops, the students must freeze. After they've completed that activity, each group moves one station in a direction of your choosing.

    Mat Attack

    • Place four to six mats around the room for Mat Attack. Have students pair up; one student sits on her knees while the other student takes hold of the mat and drags the kneeling student around the room. The student on her knees attempts to tag other mats. When a mat has been tagged, the pair of students must wait until another active pair tags them back into the game. Winners are the final team remaining.

    Mat Attack Race

    • Mat Attack Race has a similar setup to Mat Attack, as one student sits on her knees while her teammate drags the mat. But in Mat Attack Race, each pair of students start behind a starting line. When you say, "go," the students race to the other side of the room and back. The first pair of students to return to the starting line have won the Mat Attack Race.

    Newspaper Challenge

    • Give each student a newspaper and have them open it to a page of their choice and set it on the floor in a safe area. For each round of Newspaper Challenge, have the students each choose a story from the newspaper. Choose a number between one and 50 and a number between one and seven. The first number is how many words into the story the keyword is. The second number is how far into the keyword the chosen letter is. When the student identifies her letter, she must complete an acrobatic activity that begins with the letter from the keyword. For example, the letter "S" could have a student perform a somersault, and the letter "J" could have the student do a jumping jack. The validity of the acrobatic activity is up to the instructor's discretion. If a student is the last one to complete her acrobatic activity in the class, she is out. If the student's word does not have enough letters in it to choose a letter based on the instructor's number, her turn does not count. The last student remaining in the class is the winner.

    Snakes

    • Choose a locomotor skill such as hopping, jumping, skipping or walking. Choose two or three students and designate them as snakes. The goal of the snakes is to tag the students who are not snakes. The students who are not snakes must try to elude the snakes using only the locomotor skill the instructor has chosen. If the students are tagged or elude the snakes using a skill other than the locomotor skill chosen, they must join the rest of the snakes. The last student who has not been tagged is the winner.