If can be challenging to come up with unique and engaging PE games and activities for young children.  Most early learning serices, kindergartens and schools have hula hoops, but their use is often limited to a marker on the ground.  Hula hoops can be used for a wealth of physical education exercises, and also as a stimulus for imaginative play.

“If you’ve got children and you bring them out, you you can make them really work: open up their minds to do more”
Bernadette Smith – Managing Director of In2hula

Below is video footage from the Hula Hoop session at the Energise 2018 conference in Christchurch.  The dynamic Bernadette Smith demonstrated a multitude of ways that teachers could use a hula hoop to improve the cognitive function, fitness and motor skills of the children they work with.

Hula hoops provide a versatile tool for sustained children’s fitness programmes, or for short ‘wake up blasts’ between intensely brain focused activities.

This session was for primary school teachers (elementary school for our American friends), but many of the same benefits apply no matter what the age of the children.

Two of the key benefits of hula hooping are that:
1. it is a health promoting activity that teachers can easily engage in with their students
2. it can be done virtually anywhere, and even 5-10 minutes of hooping regularly is sufficient to build cardio fitness and tone your muscles

Currently In2hula offers a complete facilitated or downloadable hula hooping programme for early childhood services.  Plans are underway to put together a similar programme for primary school education services.

For more ideas about how to use hula hoops creatively for PE games and primary physical education activities you can subscribe to the In2hula YouTube channel