Printable Activity Dice
Photo by Ryan Ancill on Unsplash
Active for Life offer printable activity dice to introduce a fun way for children make active play choices. The dice printouts are available in two versions.
The first, which focuses on balance poses, is produced by KIDDO, an Australian program similar to Active for Life developed by the University of Western Australia and is available at https://kiddo.edu.au/home/activities/balance-dice
This dice provides ideas for balance exercises. If they prove enjoyable to the child, the site recommends making your own dice, using the shape outline provided, to add additional poses. The exercises are targeted to 2-5 year olds and, when helping the child learn balance skills, the recommendation is to encourage children to follow the balance teaching cues of:
1. Head up
2. Aeroplane arms
3. Eyes forward looking at something ahead of them, e.g. tree.
To make it easier, start by demonstrating the balance pose for the child.
Once the poses become familiar, a couple of suggestions to add include:
• Write a time (e.g. 8/5/10 seconds) on each face, the first roll determines which balance pose to hold, the second roll determines for how long it must be held.
• If playing with someone else, if you correctly guess what face it lands on, the other person has to do the balance, not you.
On the Active for Life site, there is a short KIDDO video demonstrating how to use the dice.
The second dice, produced by Active for Life, focuses on practising movement skills that help develop physical literacy, like throwing and jumping.
Suggested ways of using the dice include:
• As a “boredom buster”
• As part of a short movement break, e.g. after extended computer/video game/homework time, or when children have been cooped up indoors by bad weather and need to let off some energy.
• As activity stations in a homemade indoor obstacle course.