Keep Your Kids Active Indoors With Oversized Inflatable Dice

My son has learned a lot from his martial arts teacher—so many wonderful lessons about respect, discipline, determination and confidence. But my favourite take-away from the past two years of his training: Kids don’t mind doing a bunch of push-ups, sit-ups and jumping jacks if you let them roll giant dice across the floor first.

It is the favourite activity of every kid in his class. They seem to love it even more than the coveted obstacle course day their instructor throws in every now and then. He has two heavier, padded dice—one with numbers and one with symbols of the exercises. The kids take turns rolling them to see how many of which exercise they’ll have to do. (And if one of them rolls a one or a two, their instruction inevitably frowns, says, “No, two isn’t enough… let’s do twenty!” and they all let out a good-natured groan and grin at each other.)

Anyway, it occurred to me recently that this would actually be a good way to get your kids moving and let out that extra cooped-up energy that plagues them in the winter. You probably don’t want them rolling heavy padded dice around your living room; but an inflatable or foam set would do just fine.

Make sure you get a set of at least two—you can use one for the numbers and take a Sharpie to the other one to write on their favourite exercises. Some ideas:

• Frog Jumps

• Bunny Hops

• High Knees

• Butt-Kickers

• Mountain-Climbers

• Sit-ups

• Push-ups

• Jumping Jacks

• Star Jacks

An alternative if you’d rather steer them toward mindfulness: Teach them a few yoga poses and have them roll to see how many seconds (times ten) they have to hold each pose.

Whenever you sense them getting too rambunctious, pull out the dice and start rolling.