I drew up a plan for our themes for the entire year at the start of the summer, and could not have planned this theme more perfectly if I tried! It just so happened that during the two weeks I had the construction theme planned for, our gymnasium was under construction! I didn't even have to decorate, as the construction crew took care of that. Since I knew we would be changing rooms, the only decoration I hung on the wall was “Gymnastics Zone” spelled out on orange cone shaped construction paper.
While our themes change twice each month, our "lesson plan" typically remains the same so you will find this lesson plan to be very similar to our Safari theme. We change out some props and the narrative of the exercises to keep things fresh and fun for the littles. Boredom will definitely make your preschool program bust, so its good to change things up every once in a while. A weekly theme was too much work, as was coming up with complete new plans for each theme, so structuring our preschool program with two themes each month with generally the same lesson plans was our happy medium.
For warm up we played a fun game called builders and dozers. We broke the class into two teams (sometimes coaches versus students). One team (the builders) tries to build pit blocks in stacks of three while the other team (the dozers) crawls around and knocks down the stacks. To make it more or less challenging, we would add rules like you had to crab walk, bear crawl, skip, hop on one foot, etc. to move around.
We then made stacks of the blocks about the floor and they each had to log roll towards their stack and knock it down.
We also played a game of red light, green light (the coach is the traffic director around road construction). This game is great for helping little ones turn on their "listening ears".
The entire narrative of the warm up stretch focused on construction. Since we were under construction, we asked questions like "what are you most excited about" while we stretched, but you could ask them if they ever built things out of legos, if anyone has a family member that works construction, what their favorite construction vehicle is... you get the idea!
The floor setup was very similar to Safari week, but instead of hopscotch on the animal tracks, we placed directional arrows. They would jump, turning either 1/4 turn or a 1/2 turn, to position their feet so they were pointing in the direction the arrows were pointing. Then they would log roll down the cheese mats, tight like a compactor, cartwheel on the cartwheel mat, jump up to a panel mat and roll off, lever down to pick up a plastic construction vehicle, and then walk their feet up a wedge that was propped against the wall (handstand drill) while pretending they were a dump truck lifting its bed to dump the load.
Remember our mini watering hole during safari week? Well it turned into a construction site! As a side station, they could play in the construction site while waiting for their turn.
For bars instead of swinging like a monkey to knock down a wedge, they stacked pit blocks and swung to demolish their building.
The swinging safari bridge became a rickety bridge under construction to walk across.
Beam also had a few transformations. Instead of a Safari puzzle, a construction puzzle was used. The puzzle pieces were placed along the beam with the puzzle board at the other end. Starting at the puzzle board, they would walk out to the first puzzle piece, pick it up, turn around, and walk back to place it in the puzzle. They would continue this until they completed the puzzle.
Instead of crawling into the tigers den, they crawled into a mining cave.
On the third beam we placed construction cones to jump, leap, and or step over, and the follow
For the final beam station, we pretended the dots were mud and they would place their strong arms on the beam and jump from side to side on the mud splatters.
Undergoing construction was completely worth it! Check out our new preschool space where we finished up the last few days of our construction theme.
Thanks for stopping by! I hope to share more inspiration preschool gymnastics themes and lesson plans!
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