Indoor Activities to Develop Gross Motor Skills
Gross motor skills are body movements such as walking, running, jumping, throwing, etc. In order to develop gross motor skills we must be able to coordinate our large muscle groups (arms, legs, and core) to work together. Practice and repetition are the best ways to develop and fine tune gross motor skills. In this week’s blog I am going to give you some fun indoor activities to help develop your child’s gross motor skills.Crab Soccer = Get into the crab position and kick a ball. You can divide up into teams and kick towards a goal or simply just kick it back and forth between one another.
Hop scotch = Build a hop scotch board inside with pillows, tape, or with paper plates. Working on jumping with 1 foot and 2 feet and be sure to alternate between the left and the right.
Bubbles and Balloons = You can blow bubbles and have your kids try to pop them all, or blow up several balloons and have them keep them off the floor. Both of these are great ways to improve hand eye coordination.
Activity Dice = Create dice out of wood blocks and write a different activity on each side such as hopping on 1 foot, running, balancing on 1 foot, crab walking, etc. Then make another die with all different numbers. Have them roll both dice and do the activity the set number of times.
Walking balance = Build a balance beam with your child and practice walking different ways such as forward and backward.
These are just a few different outdoor gross motor activities that you can try. Below are a few links that have tons of other different ideas.
http://www.earlylearningactivities.com/PDF/og.pdf
http://codenamemama.com/2011/08/11/gross-motor-games/
http://handsonaswegrow.com/
-Matthew D’Antonio, PT, DPT
Pediatric Physical Therapist
