We are always looking for fun, new ways to engage our students. We’re also not afraid to go big and step out of the box. So when I saw these ball pits on Amazon I knew we were going to use one in our classroom! That’s where our classroom ball pit was born!
Classroom Ball Pit: How And Why
Our ball pit is from Amazon. What I love about this ball pit is that it easily collapses for storage. If we don’t want to use the ball pit, we can put it away!
For the ball pit, we ordered 100 colored balls and 400 white balls.
I have also found ball pit balls at yard sales for super cheap!
The original idea behind our classroom ball pit was to celebrate the 100th day of school by finding balls and working on number identification to 100.
The classroom ball pit is a math center choice. BUT it’s not on our wheel. Instead, it’s a reward center. A student or two is selected to use the ball pit. Once they finish finding all 100 balls, another student is chosen.
Classroom Ball Pit: Number Recognition
Each of the colored balls is numbered 1-100. Students sit in the ball pit and choose a ball. They say the number and color the number on their recording sheet.
As they find a ball, the place it in the basket. This keeps them from grabbing the same ball and the basket means we don’t have 100 balls rolling around the room. When they finish, they just dump the balls back into the ball pit!
The great thing about the ball pit is that it can be used for almost any skills! You can simply change out the colored balls out with different skills: sight words, letters, sounds, addition, subtraction and more!
Here is a video of our classroom ball pit in action!
The recording sheet is from our 100th day of school creation:
For more on our math block, check out this post:
