Children can develop their gross motor skills through various fun activities which you can engage with your child at home. These activities should engage the use of large muscles of legs, arms and trunk, hence requiring the movement of the whole body. These skills are important because your child will be using them for the self help activities and their daily engagement with environment. Below are some of the activities that can help your child to enhance their gross motor skills.

1. Hurdle Game

Here you can make hurdles at your home using pillows, boxes, lower level stools, chairs, along with this don’t forget to put mat below for your child’s safety. Now your child will have to cross the obstacles by hopping through pillows, crawling from under the chair, climbing the stools and getting down. Here we can also use foot prints shaped cut outs in different directions for your child to hop from one step to the other. This will also help your child to balance while hoping from one step to the other.

2. Scavenger Hunt

Scavenger hunt can be done outside and inside home. For this you will get your child in hunting various products it can be stones, their favorite toy at home. You need to give some hints to your child for example ‘your toy is at the place where you spend most of your time’. While playing outside home, along with your child you can be on a mission to collect things like stones, bird’s feather, dried leaves, flowers, etc. This will get your child going and moving around the home and outside, along with having fun.

3. Paper Ball Throw

This activity can be really fun for your child. Ask your child to crush the old newspaper or any other waste paper that you have at home. After crushing them and making a paper ball of it tell your child to throw the ball in such a way that it should go into the box or bucket which is kept at some distance. You can also engage in this game with your child so that the kid participates actively and come into a competition with

4. Bubble Chasing

This is a simple activity where you don’t have to encourage your child to play and engage in it, you just have to blow bubbles and your child will start chasing them and try to catch them. You should also let the kid make bubbles. This activity is the easiest and very helpful for your child where he will be using the gross motor skills.

5. Trampoline

Children love to go outside and have fun, so trampolines can be a good activity for them where they will enjoy, jump and also learn to balance themselves because trampoline is moving constantly. You can take your child to trampolines at weekends or whenever you feel like.

All of these activities can be done with children as they will be enjoying them. But we should keep in mind that a child gets bored very easily so these activities should not be done very frequently, you can also add activities like dancing, simply running and chasing in the parks or any other activity that gets your child moving.

Muskan Harjai
(Early Childhood Educator)

M.A. Education (Early Childhood Education and Care)