Counting and Catching with Captain Ball

Coaching a sport has forced me to learn a lot in one of my weaker areas. Our maths faculty is actually quite sporty, but I fit a more standard stereotype!

So learning to coach has been interesting. Just like all areas of my teaching, I like to make it all about games. I've learned to adapt a lot of games to the skills I need my kids to practise.

Recently I tried bringing one of my sports activities into my Numeracy Roll Call.

 The game is Captain ball and if you don't know it, it goes like this:

• Two or more teams line up. The first player from each team stands facing the rest of the line with a bit of a gap
• The leading player has a ball (or bean bag, or whatever you have that you can throw and catch)
• They throw to the first person in the line, who catches and throws it back then sits down
• The leading player throws to the next and so on until the last player in the line catches the ball
• The last player runs up to the leading position, the previous leader joins the line at the front and all players stand back up
• When all players have completed their time as the leader, the whole team sits down to show they are finished
• First team to finish wins

The Numeracy variation is pretty simple, you just call out numbers in a sequence as you catch. For example, counting by twos, fives or tens would be a good place to start.

Good for a learning activity with kids who are restless and need to move around. I think we all have plenty of those!

What other numeracy or mathematics skills could we adapt captain ball to?