This is the kind of activity that takes five minutes to set up and lasts a whole evening. A handful of cheap plastic air-flow balls (the kind with holes punched through them, like a Wiffle ball, used in indoor sports), a packet of glow sticks, and a dark living room. Slot a cracked glow stick into each ball, turn the lights off, and a row of softly glowing colored balls is ready to roll across the floor. The play that comes out of it covers bowling, rolling, chasing, and eventually a glowing bath. Ages 2 to 5.
What you need
- Eight plastic air-flow balls. These are the lightweight perforated balls used for indoor cricket, soccer, and floorball. The honeycomb of holes is what makes the activity work. A glow stick slides right into one of them.
- One packet of glow sticks. The thin bendable kind that come in mixed colors. One stick per ball, ideally; two if you have plenty.
- A dark room. Living room with curtains pulled, evening light, lamps off.
Building the balls
This is the only step. Bend a glow stick to crack the inner glass and shake it until it lights up. Push one end of the glow stick through a hole in the ball, then feed the rest through and tuck the far end into another hole on the opposite side so the stick is secured inside the ball. The glow stick bends to follow the ball’s curve.
Repeat for the rest of the balls. If you have leftover glow sticks, double up. Two sticks per ball reads much brighter from across the room.
A safety note: glow sticks work because of a thin glass vial inside a flexible plastic tube, snapped on purpose to mix two chemicals. Keep the sticks intact. If a stick is heavily crushed or punctured, the contents can leak out. The fluid is non-toxic but it stains, and a leaking stick should be replaced before play, not played with.
The play
Turn the lights off. Hand a small child a ball. The first thing that tends to happen is just looking. Eight glowing balls on a carpet in the dark are weirdly beautiful, and a toddler will sit with them for a minute before doing anything.
Then the rolling starts. Set one ball in the middle of the floor as the pin. The child stands a few feet away with another ball and rolls it across the carpet to try to hit the pin. It is the simplest possible bowling: one pin, one ball, soft target, glow trails sliding across the floor. The hand-eye coordination is sneakier than you would expect, because aiming a rolling ball at a small glowing target in low light asks more of a small child than the same activity in daylight.
From there, the play tends to fan out:
- Multiple pins set up in a row at one end of the room, one ball used as the bowler. A real little bowling alley setup, just glowing.
- Rolling balls back and forth between two people across the floor. Easier in the dark, because you can see the trail of the ball as it travels.
- Spinning a ball in place. Easier with a heavier ball, but the lighter air-flow balls will spin if you give them a twist.
- Hide and seek with the balls. One person hides a single ball somewhere in the dark room, the other has to find the glow.
The unexpected best part: the bath
When the carpet game runs out, the balls and the glow sticks both still work in the bath. Drop the glow-loaded balls into a bathtub of water and a small child has a whole new game in front of them. The balls do not float (the air-flow design lets water through), but they sink slowly, glow underwater, and can be pushed around or piled up.
The bath water itself takes on the faint glow of the sticks. Eight balls is enough to throw colored light onto the tile walls. A child who is normally hard to settle into a bath will sit happily for a glow-stick bath that ends in pajamas straight after.
How long do they last
Glow sticks glow for around eight hours after cracking. They start bright, dim slowly through the evening, and are usually faded by morning. The first night is the brightest. Day two is dimmer but still works. By day three the sticks are spent. Slide them out of the balls and recycle the plastic balls back into a toy box; the air-flow balls themselves are durable and last for years.
For another quiet pre-bed activity that uses soft glowing light, our Owl Babies sponge painting turns three small canvases into light-up wall art for a child’s bedroom. And for a quieter sit-down option in the same age band, our free summer coloring pages give a child something to color before the lights go out.