Happy Halloween, Rec Gym Pros!
What better reason to decorate the gym than Halloween!!!!
Here’s what we did for this week’s theme… (apologies for the poor photo quality and the sideways pictures! I’ll comeback and fix these up soon!)
As always, we decorate the back wall by the tumble track with shapes – so it was spiders, bats and pumpkins this time around! These are foam shapes from the dollar store, so saves us the time of actually cutting anything out!
One of my athlete coaches climbed this 4 ft ghost to the top of the rope/rings! The kids love this guy and love trying to climb up to reach it!
Pumpkin Balloons! The coaches will play “Keep Up” or use these “pumpkins” to hold while walking on beams. We ran out of time this year to do it ahead of time, but last year we drew jack-o-lantern faces on them!
We used fishing line to hang plush jack-o-lanterns from the bar…. we have similar bats hanging on our single bar as well.
It’s a fuzzy photo, but here is our JFK bar set. We generally decorate the posts as much as we can, so there is some sparkly fabric (hard to see) and some caution take. We also have an orange spider web. I tried the stringy DIY cotton spiderweb stuff and it didn’t seem to work too well for me.
Beam is always my favourite to plan! We wrapped caution tape for the kids to step over and then the black cat on the end usually serves a couple purposes. One option is to just pet it (the kids just started doing this one day, so now we roll with it), and sometimes we’ll use the cat to demonstrate a “mad cat” pose and we have the kids try to balance that way on the beam. We also stuffed the jack-o-lantern leaf bags with foam cubes just for extra fun!
There is no shortage of obstacles to step/jump/leap over at Halloween! The bean bags on the leg and the pumpkins on the right were all found at the dollar store!
Here’s another leaf bag filled with cubes!
We use these foam cutout shapes all over the place. For jumping on/over/around or for climbing over as well (like on the left, the coach wanted kids to bear crawl across without touching the bats)!
We used this bucket and bean bags for warm ups — so we’d play some Halloween music (see list at the bottom) and then when the music stopped, kids would freeze and say “trick or treat?!”. The coach picks “TRICK!” and asks the kids to show a skill of their choice (stork stand, star jump, etc) and then after each kid can pick up a bean bag “treat” to put in the bucket. Continue again with the music – bonus when coaches ask kids to move around like witches, ghosts, zombies, etc.
Two last fun stations! First is the haunted house, which we do have to explain to some kids is just pretend! Second is a jump into pumpkin soup!
And that is about it for Halloween week! If you are looking for Halloween music to use, try these songs from YouTube:
HAVE A SAFE & HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
