Fun Gross Motor Activity Ideas for Groups of Kids

Gross motor activities — things like climbing, crawling, jumping and throwing — are great for little kids because those big movements are essential first steps to fine motor skills. They’re also lots of fun and a way for kids to burn off a little energy.

Teach Me Mommy has a great collection of gross motor activities for groups, which she road-tested on a group of five-year-olds. They require minimal amounts of equipment and some of them would be great for doing at home as well, such as jumping through a maze of hula hoops and using chalk shapes on the sidewalk to count, jump into and throw bean bags into.

(Read more: ideas for playing and learning with chalk.)

Life Over Cs has another great idea for a gross motor activity that can be one with one or many kids. Her move like an insect gross motor play includes a printable die with different movements on it that can be acted out by kids, such as crawling like a caterpillar, flapping like a butterfly and wiggling like a worm. So cute.

Do you have any go-to gross motor games you like to use with your kids? I’d love to hear about them!

[Photo via Teach Me Mommy.]

Check out these insect activity kits and these Insect bug keepers

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Easy Sensory Activities for Valentine's Day

With summer coming soon in the Northern Hemisphere, it’s a fun time to incorporate activities and crafts with a sunny theme. Take some time to learn about the sun (this post from National Geographic Kids is a good one) and then do some sun activities.

Sun prints are a classic summer activity, and there are lots of ways to do them, from placing objects on construction paper (like in this craft from MomBrite) or by using sun print paper (aka cyanotype paper).

Practice threading, counting, color sorting and other skills with this easy sun threading activity from Taming Little Monsters.

Lessons 4 Little Ones has a great blog post full of ideas for science experiments using the sun, such as melting crayons, looking at shadows, making a sun dial and trying a solar oven. Printables to go with the lessons are available for purchase or you can just talk through the students’ hypotheses about what will happen and draw or otherwise record the results.

This updraft tower from Almost Unschoolers is a cool way to illustrate that the heat of the sun causes an updraft, which makes the pinwheel spin. This is a good one to do inside near a sunny window so you don’t have wind spinning the pinwheel instead.

You’ll want to get out in the sun to try this experiment form Life with Moore Babies to see what kinds of things the sun can melt. Using different kinds of sweets you can see how the sun melts things by itself and how you can concentrate the power of the sun with a magnifying glass.

Playing with shadows is fun for kids of all ages, and you can track a shadow through the day with this experiment from Science Sparks. If you’re working with multiple kids they can each choose an object to shadow (ha!) and at the end of the day you can see how different their shadows looked.

And of course you’ll want to make a sun themed suncatcher craft, right? This one from Fox Farm Home uses all the pretty flowers you collect on your nature walk and puts them in a sun-shaped frame.

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