How You Can Involve Your Child in a Sport (+ 7 Worksheet Bundles To Make This Process Educational)

Sports can bring both physical and emotional benefits for kids.

Exercise helps your child increase their strength and stamina, improve their lung capacity, develop balance and mobility, and hone their hand-eye coordination. Plus there’s the added bonus of fresh air and being outdoors.

Keeping active is super important for kids’ mental health, too. Regular involvement in team sports is a great mood booster, and a good way to develop social skills. Sports also teach kids about winning and losing — and how to handle each graciously!

And, with the right resources, you can take your kid’s favorite sports and use them as inspiration for history, geography, and art lessons.

Don’t believe us?

Keep reading for a long list of sports worksheets and lesson plans — ideal to go hand in hand with your child’s physical education.

7 sports worksheet bundles, ideal for every active kid

Swimming

Does spending all day by the pool, practicing diving and headstands (and the occasional cannonball!) sound like your kid’s perfect summer?

It’s amazing to think that humans have been swimming for leisure for over 7,000 years — there are actually cave paintings of people swimming from the Stone Age!

Our swimming fact file and worksheet goes through the history of swimming and is a great way to supplement this form of exercise through education. This 24-page worksheet bundle also comes with activities and games, and will serve as a fun summer lesson — if you can keep your kids on dry land for long enough!

Baseball

There’s a reason that baseball is called America’s favorite pastime — no matter your skill level, or whether you play in a league or just in the backyard, it’s always fun.

If your kids already have an interest in baseball or play on a team, they might love to learn a little more about it.

Baseball has played a pretty big role throughout American history, it was even being played way back during the Civil War. But despite it being such a major sport in US history, kids might be surprised to learn that it was brought here by English settlers! They had a different form of the bat-and-ball game, and Americans evolved it into the sport we know and love today.

Our 27-page baseball worksheet bundle is full of fun facts and talks about the rise of our favorite ball game. It’ll give them a bit of a deeper insight into the sport, and one activity encourages kids to create their own baseball team and design a logo and name.

Soccer

Whether you call it soccer or football, this sport is one of the most popular in the world!

With it being so dominant in Europe, you might be shocked to learn that the earliest recorded form of the game dates back to China over 2,000 years ago. Similar games were also played in Japan and Australia around the same time.

Strangely, it didn’t gain popularity in Europe until the 1300s. Shortly afterward, the game was banned because of the chaos that it caused by rival teams!

Our soccer fact file and worksheet bundle is full of more fun facts and some insightful history of the sport, with activities that’ll keep your kids occupied when they’re off the pitch.

Basketball

Did you know that basketball is a relatively young sport? It was invented in the 1890s, and originally the hoops were just old peach baskets.

A couple of years later, backboards were introduced, after spectators kept trying to interfere with balls that missed the basket. The NBA was formed 30 years later, and basketball became the national obsession that it is today!

We’ve got a fact file and 25-page worksheet bundle for kids who are interested in basketball — it’s got a full history of the sport and loads of cool facts that’ll get them excited to play.

Hockey

Field hockey has been played for centuries but ice hockey wasn’t introduced until the late 1800s in — yep, you guessed it! — Canada. It’s the national sport of Latvia and is really popular in European countries like Slovakia and Czechia.

Meanwhile, field hockey is played a lot in warmer countries like Australia and South Africa. Roller hockey — played on roller skates — is also gaining in popularity around the world.

Our 24-page worksheet bundle will introduce kids to all types of hockey, and how it has spread and evolved over the years.

Athletics

Athletics is so diverse that there’s a real chance your kid will find something here they love.

Athletics covers running (long-distance and sprints), jumping, throwing, and walking, and it dates all the way back to the first ancient Olympic games in 776 BC.

Because it’s so varied, athletics is one of the most inclusive sports — anyone can find their niche based on their skill set.

If your child is interested in playing a sport but doesn’t know where to start, go through our athletics fact sheet and activity bundle with them. It introduces the sport and looks at all the different events you can try.

Tennis

Tennis started out as a pretty different sport than the one we know today. In the 11th century, French monks would hit a ball back-and-forth over a rope strung across a courtyard, but with their hands instead of rackets!

Not long after, they started wearing big gloves with webbing between the fingers, which transformed into webbing on a stick, which turned into a racket similar to what we use now.

Tennis has a pretty long history — the oldest court still in use was built by Henry VIII in the 1500s!

Our 23-page worksheet bundle details the ins-and-outs of the game, along with some facts to keep things colorful. For example: when we think tennis balls now, we see that iconic bright yellow-green color, but the balls were actually all white until 1986!