Tennis Jump Rope

Jump ropes are handy in theory
as well as in practice

In our ongoing challenge to create a tennis activity from ANY existing children's game, I present to you Tennis Jump Rope. Before yesterday, if you had asked me how to convert jump rope to a tennis activity, I probably would have wasted a lot of time trying to do something with the actual rope. As usual, one of my students was smarter than me and inspired a simpler solution.

I have recently added inexpensive jump ropes to my tennis bag of goodies to use both as a warm-up activity as well as a reward activity at the end of class. My students love it. So jump rope has been on my mind recently more than usual. Yesterday during a Red Ball class, one of my students mentioned how well she had done that day in her school P.E. class, getting 27 boyfriends in the jump rope game. Considering she is 6, I had to know more! The answer was the prelude to our new tennis game.

Her P.E. class was using this old jump rope rhyme:

Ice cream, ice cream

Cherry on top

How many boyfriends

Do you have*? 

And voila, there we have our new tennis game. We used the jump rope rhyme to track our rallies. We sped up the spoken words a little bit so that Ice cream, ice cream went with one rally, Cherry on top went with the next, etc. so we could get to the counting quicker. It worked beautifully. I also taught them the Cinderella jump rope rhyme so that we had two to practice with.

Cinderella dressed in yellow

Went upstairs to kiss her fellow

Made a mistake and kissed a snake

How many doctors did it take?

Fun day!

*probably used to be 'got' instead of 'have' to rhyme better, but thank you teachers everywhere for opting for proper grammar!