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