As the new school year approaches, so do new challenges for teachers, therapists and parents. With all the different models for keeping kids and staff safe, new ideas have to be put in place to make learning and motor skills successful! This includes social distancing measures when in person school is in session. This also means trying to eliminate any sharing of items. To help ease the burden of coming up with new ideas for new scenarios, here are ideas for social distancing gross motor activities!
Social Distancing Gross Motor Activities
The following gross motor ideas are great for individuals or partners (from a safe distance). None of the ideas require any equipment so there is no worries about sanitizing equipment between kids or cross contamination worries.
Yoga
This is one of the easiest. Avoid partner poses and keep the spacing far enough apart. Get tons of different yoga pose ideas from the website. There are also several different yoga cards available in the shop. Not only is this a great option for social distancing, but works well in person and distance learning/teletherapy.
Brain Breaks/Fitness Station
Like yoga any kind of fitness/movement activities can be done when spaced out. Pink Oatmeal has several different brain break ideas that you can use to make this easier. Get the brain break cards here!
Setting up different stations or circuits and limiting each station to one person per session. Working on no touch exercises is ideal for these stations. The fitness circuits, yoga circuits, or the best value fitness bundle can help you with this. There are several different themed stations you could include as well. The picture below is an example of this using the winter sports stations. No equipment is needed for the exercises.
Social Distance Gross Motor Activities and Games
Making gross motor into a game is always such a fun option! Kids don’t even realize they are working on skills. It’s also a way to combine movement and learning with many of the different games and interact with friends from a distance.
Math With Movement
Subtraction, addition, multiplication, and number recognition are just the beginning of all the things that can be done with this math with movement gross motor game.
This is a fun game to play with friends. It is a spin off of the traditional “Simon Says” game. Keep an appropriate distance when creating your color spots. The gross motor move could also be changed up for this activity. Instead of jumping, do a single foot hop. This could also easily be changed up to numbers, letters etc.
Creating two lines an appropriate distance apart is another fun way to interact safely with gross motor skills. The same matching mentality goes into play with these games. Instead of color spots, you are using lines. Pick from all different sorts of gross motor activities to work on while staying on the line.
Digital Gross Motor Activities
You may be in the position that even if you are back in school you are working on gross motor skills from a different room. This may look more like teletherapy. Pink Oatmeal has several different games that are FUN to choose from to make your life easier. These games are no prep. Pull them up and play. They can be played right in a PDF file, in PowerPoint or converted to Google Slides.
There are several different themes and activities to choose from when you visit the digital section of the Pink Oatmeal shop.
SEE ALL OF THE IDEAS FOR TELETHERAPY HERE
An example of the Ice Cream Themed Digital Game