4 good things to do with hoops

As timers

Try spinning a hula hoop on the floor and you’ll find that it can stay spinning for quite a while before it drops to the floor.

This could act as a timer for another movement, such as cartwheels or star jumps or toe taps onto a football or pairs throwing and catching a bean bag.

How many can you do before the hula hoop stops spinning?
Can you then beat your score?

Noughts and crosses 

Set-up a grid of nine hula hoops in a 3*3 grid, like a noughts and crosses board.

Two teams of three players play a relay race and take turns to run to the grid. Let’s say you have a Blue team and a Red team. The Blue team have three Blue bibs and the Red team have three Red bibs.

Each person carries a coloured bib with them and drops it into one of the hoops on the grid. Once you have used all your bibs you can move one of yours to a new hoop instead.

They are aiming to make three in a row, and the first team to do this wins.

Belts

This tag game works with large hoops and small children.

Children are in pairs. Some pairs are the taggers and some pairs must escape from the taggers.
However, each pair must travel around together inside a hoop, with the hoop about waist height (like a belt).

This makes moving around difficult and tests their ability to work together.

Zombies

In some games – like tag games for example – the fastest children always win. And sometimes you need to find ways to slow them down to even things up.

You can easily turn people into zombies by restricting them to moving with one foot dragging a hoop along the floor.

Or maybe just hula hooping?