Cosmic Bowling in PE

If you are looking for a new activity that every single one of your PE students will love…then COSMIC BOWLING is the activity you need. I have never done any activity where kids were as excited as they were over this. I have never had so many students tell me how much they enjoyed an activity and that is was “super fun” before. If you have a chance to do this, DO IT!

I will give you a warning, the set up for this is pretty intensive, but so worth it. I will link everything I used in this blog so you can snag it.

Lane Set Up:

To create the bowling lanes I used rope lights https://amzn.to/40cB9wg to make clear bowling lanes. These are 33 ft. and seemed to be plenty long enough. At the end of each lane I used plastic bowling pins and balls https://amzn.to/3XMfvgB. These kids sets were perfect and I wasn’t worried about them harming the gym floor. Another option is to get bowling pins donated from your local bowling alley. These won’t be as kind to your gym floor but would be a good option for outside or if you have a cover for your flooring like we do at my school. I also had a lane with giant blow up pins https://amzn.to/3XNhKQX and a scooter board so students could human bowl. The giant pins were definitely a hit, but had to be done with a lot of caution. To make the pins easier to see I wrapped the pins with two strips of glow in the dark tape https://amzn.to/3XPe1Cs, this is also what I used to tape my rope lights down. The tape glowed great under black lights. At the back of the bowling lanes I used black lights to illuminate the tape on the pins and the decor I hung on the walls https://amzn.to/3HiQWkC. The last set up for the lanes was cones around the perimeter. I put glow sticks under the cones to make them glow and illuminate.

Other Decor:

I hung neon/glow in the dark garland behind the lanes and in various parts of my gym https://amzn.to/3Dsi4MG which looked awesome illuminated by the black lights. I also used a few of these strobe lights https://amzn.to/3Hfo4K1 to light up all the walls. A rotating disco ball https://amzn.to/40ba5xj is also a MUST! There are plenty of other light options that can be used that project stars or other things that would be great to add as well.

Student Giveaways:

The biggest hit (surprise surprise) was that I had glow stick options for each student to have to wear. I had glow bracelets https://amzn.to/40cCjYu, big glow sticks https://amzn.to/3RfdWpd, and just regular glow sticks https://amzn.to/3DsjhUe for students to take and wear during the activity. Give them anything that glows and I promise you will be their favorite person (for the day at least).

Scoring:

I chose to incorporate tech for scoring and had them download (on iphone) the “my bowling scorecard” app. I’m not sure if it is available on android or not. Since I teach high school most of them had a phone and this was an option. If not, you could always teach them how to score manually. The app is easy to use and let them put in the score for each frame and calculated for them so it made it much easier than manually scoring.

Play:

I have 30ish kids per class so I had 5 lanes and had them split up evenly with one phone per group for scoring. This put 5-6 kids per lane which took about 40 mins for them to play a full game. Next time I would set up more lanes with less students so they could play more than one game, but that will happen as I grow my supplies.

If you really want to get fancy and dress the part (I did), then this bowling shirt https://amzn.to/3HEedyL was a hit and there are a ton of options for colors and designs.