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Looking for some fun gross motor activities for preschoolers? Check this out!
Sometimes, the most popular item in my therapy bag isn’t a toy at all! In this case, it is a stack of die cut frogs that I picked up at the dollar store. They can also be found here. My preschoolers LOVE playing with these and they are unbelievably motivating!
One of the most common things I address in physical therapy is teaching kids how to climb stairs safely. In our school district, many of the children live in apartment buildings and they are more proficient at pushing elevator buttons than they are at climbing the stairs with the appropriate alternating pattern. Who can blame them? Elevators are MUCH more fun!
To practice the stairs, we often play a simple game called Feed the Frogs. I have the kids spread the frogs out all over the floor at the base of the stairs. Then, I give them a handful of colored pompoms and have them scatter them on the floor at the top of the stairs. We call the pompoms “BUGS”!
Now comes the exciting part! I ask the child to find a certain colored “bug”. He has to climb up those stairs (one foot at a time is what we are going for here), find the right bug, come back down the stairs and place it onto a frog’s mouth. I add in a little sound effect for giggles (“num, num, num!”) and we do it all over again!
I try to throw a little OT in this activity too by encouraging the use of efficient grasping skills to pick up and hold those bugs!
If the child is working on counting, I write numbers on each of the frogs and the child has to place the correct number of bugs on that frog’s mouth. or maybe we work on sorting the bugs by color. This is a perfect activity to combine movement and learning!
If your child isn’t quite catching on to the idea of alternating his feet on the stairs, check out this quick tip for teaching stair climbing!
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