Sensory alerting - these activities are great if your child needs some help to be 'alerted', to help engage and motivate them. 

Sensory calming - these activities will help if your child can become over stimulated and needs calming down and soothing. 

Gross Motor Skills  allow us to do things that involve using the large muscles in the torso, arms and legs to make big, whole-body movements. 

Here are some gross motor-focused activity ideas:

Marshmallow Shapes and Towers

You will need:

Marshmallows

Spaghetti

Try making different towers and shapes (triangles, squares, pyramids etc) by gently pushing the spaghetti strands into the marshmallows. Here are some pictures to give you ideas. 

Other Fine Motor Skill activities

Here is a collection of fine motor skills activities for young children that are easy to set up and promote a whole range of skills. They’re creative, open-ended, appropriate and varied with ideas for practising motor skills through art, sensory play and simple manipulative games and challenges.

Pom pom drop game - matching colours and counting out amounts

Patterning with lego

Draw lines with chalk - use a wet paintbrush to wipe them out

Pop the bubble wrap

Threading pasta on string to make necklaces

Put splodges of paint on a tray – cover with Cling film. Press each splodge

Encourages movement in their arm/wrist with support from the shoulder to prepare to write

• Pouring from one container to another- this would also be so much fun in the bathtub
• Putting coins into a money box – Kids love listening to the noise it makes too. To make this easier you can get them to post things into a cereal box.

• Popping bubble wrap – who doesn’t love doing this! It does need to be between two fingers to be working the right muscles
• Using scissors – just cutting to start with then cutting on the line, shapes. Just remember to be careful.
• Ripping – some kids just like ripping paper, maybe it’s the sound? You can rip up an old magazine to make pictures & collages
• Sorting M&M’s into colours (& putting them in your mouth!) Would works for skittles or similar sweets too
• Transferring objects from one bowl to another, first with fingers then with pincers. Beans, beads, buttons, rice, the smaller the object the harder it gets!
• Using building blocks – any kind of block build is great
• Watering the plants with a spray bottle
• And of course, using a crayon, pencil, paintbrush to create art.