Pickleball is great for younger students and all students because the paddle is light weight and the courts are small allowing students to cover the court easily. The rules are also simple to follow making it easier for younger grades to participate. There are many ways that you could incorporate pickleball into an elementary classroom but you could even incorporate it into outside curricular’s like intramural’s or school teams.
To incorporate pickleball in school you could…
Use it in Physical Education by teaching skills like coordination, teamwork, and agility through drills like relay races, target practice, or even as simple as practicing hitting a ball with a paddle. You could incorporate these skills through stations. After the stations, you could walk the class down to pickleball courts to play pickleball. In Grade 4, the BC Curriculum for gym content, it says “proper technique for fundamental movement skills, including non-locomotor, locomotor, and manipulative,” which pickleball includes all of the non-locomotor, locomotor, and manipulative skills. Pickleball, includes balancing, bending, twisting, running, jumping, bouncing, catching, striking and throwing. This video can give you ideas on what activities or drills you can do with younger students.
You could incorporate pickleball in Math by exploring geometry and angles by watching the trajectories of the pickleball shots. For younger grades, you could use pickleball to practice counting, or counting by twos. Or you could create word problems like: Sarah and Sam were counting how many times they were able to pass the pickleball back and forth and they both counted 42 times. If Sarah started with the pickleball and passed it to Sam, who ended with the pickleball? Additionally, at the Grade 4 level, you could incorporate pickleball into the classroom by working on perimeter or line symmetry.
Incorporating pickleball in Science by exploring the principles of physics. Or you could talk about the positive benefits that pickleball has on your body. At the Grade 4 level, to include pickleball into your science class, you could talk about energy and how there are many forms of energy, but mainly focus on kinetic energy.
For English Language Arts, depending on the age, you could create writing assignments about the rules, history, or famous pickleball players. You could also create an assignment where younger students write 1-3 sentences or words of why they liked or did not like pickleball. Depending on the age, you could also get the students to write how they played pickleball and describe some of the rally’s that they had using the correct terminology. In any grade, you can work on metacognitive strategies (which is reflecting, questioning, goal setting, and self evaluating).
For Social Studies, you could incorporate pickleball by exploring the origins of pickleball and its growth around the world. In a Grade 4 level, students can do research on a computer and create a timeline about major events that have happened in pickleball.
You could incorporate Art by making the students design their own pickleball paddle or create posters around the school to promote future pickleball clubs. Here is a website that I have found that gives you an idea on how you could create your own paddle with wood but you could also do this with cardboard! Here are some templates that I got from Alamy.com! At a Grade 4 level, the students would work on visual arts and the element of designs. Some examples of these customized pickleball paddles look like this:
I just quickly created an example of what this template could look like for a student. If it was younger students creating their own pickleball paddle, I would allow them to draw on their own or do something with a prompt like “everyone write down three feelings you felt after pickleball” and then I would hand out the template and they would draw these three feelings. For older students you could get them to do the same but write a paragraph on how they felt before giving them the template.
Pickleball could also be used as a brain break for the students and that could tie into a conversation about how sports and getting physical activity can give us a learning break which is super beneficial.
I created this poster through Canva, and the information is from Why Edify!