Create Your Own Bowling Game
How Lamar’s Bad Prank Won a Bubba Sized Trophy
1. Program Title: Create Your Own Bowling Game
2. Introduction: This activity is designed to encourage students to become interested in the everpopular but often little-understood family activity and sport of bowling, as portrayed in Crystal
Allen’s How Lamar’s Bad Prank Won a Bubba-Sized Trophy.
3. Detailed description: Using the instructions and templates provided, students will make a
bowling game with paper bowling pins and a round object or wad of paper as a ball. They can
play the game with friends or by themselves. They can keep score using the Online Bowling
Score Calculator on the website www.bowling-tips.org, or they can keep score manually using
the Bowling Score Sheets and the instructions on how to score from the same website. Students
will use the following instructions:
In How Lamar’s Big Prank Won a Bubba-Sized Trophy, Lamar Washington calls himself “the king
of Strikers.” You can become the king of your own bowling alley by making these paper bowling
pins.
Carefully cut out the templates. Note that the parts of the lines with XXXXX on them are cut to
the point where the dotted lines and solid lines meet.
Fold back the tabs with the letters.
Fold the dotted lines. The--------- lines should be folded “mountain” (with the fold to the
outside, or up) and the |-|-| lines should be folded “valley” (with the fold to the inside, or
down)
Glue the tabs to the smooth (tabless) side of each part of the pin. You will have to make the
folds first so you can line the tabs up with the smooth side. (This will make sense once you have
cut and folded the template.) You may need to use a craft stick, toothpick, or wooden coffee
stirrer to put enough glue on the tab so that the paper sticks together. Be patient!!
Stand your pin up and let the glue dry.
Make two, five, or nine more pins so you can have a triangle. The best is to have 10 total pins.
Set up your pins with a backstop of some kind. This could be the wall to the room, a shoebox
with one of the long sides cut out, or a piece of cardboard made to stand up. You want to do
this to prevent your pins from flying too far away when you hit them with your ball. Make your
ball out of the materials you have decided to use, or use a small rubber ball or gumball if one is
available.
You can roll the ball by putting it down and hitting it with a finger, by flicking it with your thumb
and forefinger, or by actually rolling it using your thumb and forefinger. See how many of your
pins you can knock down.
4. Books to display:
Abramovitz, Melissa. Bowling. Lucent, 2014
Allen, Crystal. How Lamar’s bad prank won a Bubba-sized trophy. Balzer and Bray, 2011
Brezenoff, Steven. The bowling lane without any strikes. Stone Arch, 2014
Cruickshank, Don. Bowling. AV2 by Weigl, 2014
5. Supplies:
Scissors
Bowling pin templates (3, 6, or 10)
A glue stick, white glue, rubber cement, or Scotch tape
A small craft stick, toothpick, or wooden coffee stirrer to apply the glue, if using glue
Small rubber or plastic balls, gumballs, duct tape to wad up and make into balls, or quarter
sheets of paper to make a wadded-up ball (be creative—you can use whatever you have
available.) More ideas for balls include marbles and balls made of rubber bands.
Instruction Sheet for “Create Your Own Bowling Game”
6. Resources:
www.bowling-tips.org This resource is quite complete. It has most of the information that a
novice or beginner would need about bowling, from tips on the technique to etiquette, to
scoring. There are videos and a score calculator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling
7. Bulletin board idea: Put up pictures of people bowling, pins and balls, score sheets, and bowling
alleys.