Movement Maze

If your child is bouncing off the walls and full of energy, this is the activity for you! Take advantage of that energy and build a game to focus in-on gross motor skills. Often children are developing their gross motor skills by just playing and exercising without us even knowing. But this is a simple way to be able to focus on certain gross motor skills your child may be struggling with, while also having a blast, getting active, and moving. The movement maze can really be adapted and made for your child’s strengths and or weaknesses to include a multitude of meaningful movements like: jumping, walking, hoping, throwing etc. All you need is some tape to get started. If you do not have any ideas of how you want to make your maze you can look at Moving Minds movement maze to find some inspiration. You can begin by putting different designs and lines of tape that your child has to carefully walk across. These lines can vary between straight, zig-zag, wavy etc. Encourage your child to walk carefully one foot in front of the other, this will help to build their balance. If you want to incorporate jumping and hoping, make some breaks in the tape that they have to jump to. If you’re wanting to incorporate exercises into your gross motor skills you could have little stations through the maze where they have to do an exercise like jumping jacks, crab walk, or standing on one leg. Get creative and imaginative with your movement maze, for example, the floor is lava, or water! Your movement maze can move through different rooms of the house, think of it as a type of obstacle course that is focusing on gross motor movements. Once your child has done a couple of these mazes on their own, you can let their imagination sore and they can create their own. If your are not keen on putting tape on your floors, take this activity outside. It can easily be recreated with sidewalk chalk on the pavement!