The Best Simple Gross Motor Activities To Do Today

These days you hear a lot about fine motor activities, but rarely do you ever hear about gross motor activities. Gross motor activities are just as important, but often get overlooked. I’m here to help you understand what gross motor activities are, why they’re important, as well as how you can incorporate these activities into your daily life.

With that, let’s get into it!

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. When you click these links, I may get a small commission. It won’t cost you anything, but it helps me to run this site. I only promote products and services that I think are great. Having been an educator for over a decade and a parent myself, I use my experience to judge whether a product is worthy. So, you can be assured that I always have your best interests at heart.

What Is Gross Motor?

According to the National Institutes of Health, “Gross motor skills pertain to skills involving large muscle movements, such as independent sitting, crawling, walking, or running. Fine motor skills involve use of smaller muscles, such as grasping, object manipulation, or drawing.” Think about gross motor skills as larger movements that use your whole body. In contrast, fine motor skills are often more confined to the hand.

Why Are Gross Motor Skills Important?

You often hear about fine motor skills because they are the prerequisites to academic activities such as writing. While fine motor skills are definitely important for developing precision and dexterity, gross motor skills are vital for balance and coordination. Therefore, gross motor skills should not be overlooked.

Gross Motor Activities

When thinking about activities to develop gross motor skills, think about things that encourage balance and coordination. Here are some simple activities you could do today with things you likely already have at home:

Line Walking

Use painters tape to make shapes and lines on the floor then have your kid(s) walk on them, trying to balance. If you are out and about, have your kids walk on lines that exist in the world, such as between tiles on the floor or lines that are naturally part of sidewalks. To increase the challenge here, find a curb or something for them to walk and balance on!

Jumping and/or Path Games

Another idea is to create some sort of jumping game for kids to jump along. This could be pictures of something your child is interested in, or just something you want to practice. For example, colors, shapes, letters, etc. Additionally, you could make this fun by making lily pads out of construction paper and have kids be a frog and jump between them.

I recently bought these stepping stones and have absolutely loved them! For our daughter, we started with making a path out of them and having her practice walking between them. When we first started, she would step on one, bring both feet together, pause, then move to the next one repeating with bringing both feet together. Instead, we worked on stepping across them more like she’s walking – alternating her feet and not bringing them together. After she was strong with this skill, we were able to move to jumping.

Obstacle Course Gross Motor Activities

A really fun way to work on gross motor activities is to create an indoor obstacle course. The best thing about this is that you can adjust the activities to practice different gross motor skills. For example, walking, jumping, running, skipping, and so on. Here are some things we included as part of our obstacle course for our 2 year old:

Evasion

We set up objects for our toddler to weave around. In this instance, we used these bottles I always have lying around for sensory bottles (see my post on Sensory Activities). She clearly had a hard time with the idea of evading the bottles and instead just wanted to walk over them, which is fine as well 🙂

Balance

We put these discs on the floor approximately her stride length apart from one another. We worked hard with her to balance on one foot on each, then step to the next one.

Kicking

Kicking is a hard, and super fun, skill for kids to master. To keep this simple for her, we simply had her kick the ball before moving on. You could add more of a challenge by putting a box or something on its side for your kid to kick the ball into.

Crawling

To encourage crawling, we made a simple tunnel using our couch, ottoman, and a blanket. She LOVES crawling through “tunnels.” You could also use a play tunnel for this.

Jumping

We wanted her to have to jump over something, but struggled to decide on something that we didn’t feel would be dangerous if she landed on it. We ended up deciding to use Duplos since they are small enough for her to easily jump over. As your child masters these skills, you can make them harder by encouraging jumping with 2 feet together, jumping on one foot, jumping backwards, etc.

These are just a few ideas for your obstacle course, but really the options are endless!

Let’s Wrap Up These Gross Motor Activities

This post was short and sweet, but I hope it helped you to understand what gross motor skills are, why they are important, and some simple gross motor activities you can do with your kid(s). Try it out and let me know how it goes by commenting below!