Healthy Hanukkah is a holiday-themed fitness activity designed for at-home learners!
It’s almost Hanukkah and it’s time to light the Menorah. However, the Menorah candles have gone missing! They must be hidden around the house and it is up to students to find them!
Using the printable Healthy Hanukkah Cards resource, students are on a quest to find the candle cards that are hidden throughout their house. Using a dreidel to help determine the amount of repetitions to complete, students can keep the candles they discover by performing a variety of exercise movements.
The goal of the game is to collect the nine Hanukkah Menorah candle cards as quickly as possible!
Build One: Getting Ready
To get ready for this activity, students will need to print out the Menorah Candles Sheet as well as the Candle Tracker sheet. With the sheets printed out, they can cut out the cards and tracker using scissors, making sure to be extra careful as they do so.
The Menorah Candles sheet includes nine individual candle cards and each card has a playing card code featured in the top left corner. These codes are there for students who may not have access to a printer at home. In that situation, students can switch out the candle cards for playing cards in order to be able to play. They’ll just need to have the digital Menorah Candles sheet handy so that they can follow along.
Once the candle cards are ready, students can ask a parent, guardian, or another family member to go hide all nine cards around the house!
Build Two: Healthy Hanukkah
With the candle cards hidden, we’re ready to get into the game.It’s almost Hanukkah and it’s time to get the Hanukkah Menorah ready. However, the Menorah candles have gone missing! They must be hidden around the house and it is up to students to find them!
To get this done, students will need their Candle Tracker sheet as well as a pencil and a dreidel. If they do not have access to a dreidel, they can use a mobile device to scan the QR code on the Candle Tracker sheet in order to access an interactive, digital one. With their materials in hand, they can start searching for the Menorah candles.
When a student has found a hidden candle card, they’ll be able to log that candle on their tracker sheet. However, before they may do so, they must perform some exercise!The exercise movement that the students must perform is indicated on the hidden candle card that they have discovered. In order to determine how many repetitions of the movement they must perform, the students must spin their dreidel.
When the dreidel stops spinning, they must perform the number of repetitions associated with the letter that the dreidel landed on that is shown on the candle card.
There is a different amount of repetitions associated with each of the dreidel’s letters: Nun, Gimel, Hey, and Shin.
As students successfully find and claim the Menorah candles, they get to log each candle into their tracker and can even make notes on where they found it and which letter their dreidel landed on. The game goes on until the students have successfully rounded up all nine of the Menorah’s candles!
Students should participate in active clothing.
Students should always look at their surroundings before performing exercises.
