gross motor Archives - JDaniel4s Mom

5 Days of Free Preschool Printables

November 4, 2023 By Deirdre

5 Days of Free Preschool Printables features fine motor or prewriting activities, numbers, alphabet letters, gross motor skills, and shapes. While fine motor or prewriting activities will be shared with JDaniel4’s Mom this week. 3 Dinosaurs will be sharing the remaining preschool skills.

Each day this week both blogs will share a preschool activity. The activities will be posted below on the day they are shared. Please take the time to come back and check out each day’s activity. It will be fun to see not only the pages you have come to expect from JDaniel4’s Mom but also find out what 3 Dinosaurs will be sharing.

5 Days of Free Preschool Printables

This series starts on November 6th and will end on November 10th. Please take a moment to visit each of the printable shared each day.

Monday

3 Dinosaurs

Alphabet Coloring Easy Reader Book Printable has a letter on each page with a matching picture for kids to color. A fun ABC activity for kids with all 26 letters of the alphabet.

JDaniel4’s Mom

Fine Motor Tracing- Animal Tracing Pages are a great way to improve fine motor skills. Children can use any number of writing tools to trace each of the animals. This set features a lion, snail, lion, owl, elephant, turtle, koala bear, monkey, penguin, narwhal, ladybug, cat, and bear.

Tuesday

Free Prewriting Printable- Funk Prewriting Tracing Stips are 3 Dinosaurs’ share for today. Children will have fun tracing over these funky lines.

Butterfly Letter Tracing Activities invite children to trace both uppercase and lowercase letters. B/W and colored bordered versions of each letter are in the set. These will be fun to explore as worksheets or laminated versions would be great in a writing center.

Wednesday

3 Dinosaurs has created a number recognition mat set that was created to use with playdough. You could use pom-poms or counters if your children don’t like working with objects with textures.

Star-Themed Alphabet Tracing Mats allow children to trace alphabet letters and stars. The mats are half-sheets. That makes them the perfect size to put in a writing center or put out on the kitchen table for your child to work on.

Thursday

3 Dinosaurs have created a simple shape-tracing set. I love that the pages display the shapes flipped and rotated.

The Tracing Lines on Turkey pages give children the chance to work on prewriting or fine motor skills along with coloring a turkey. This set comes from right here on JDaniel4’s Mom.

Friday

Turkey Line Tracing Pages invites children to trace a line that connects one turkey to another.

3 Dinosaurs have a set of gross motor movement dice movement activities that get your children up and moving. Children can put the various activities together to create a fun exercise session.

More Preschool Activities to Explore

Preschool Reading Under the Sea Printable with Letters - Your students at school or children at home can build words and word families on an under the sea work mat.

Preschool Reading and Building Words Activity

Bird Shape I Spy

Gross Motor Building Egg Carton Algorithm Activities

March 8, 2021 By Deirdre

This coding and gross motor activity set could be explore in the days leading up to Easter or during a farming unit or any time you like. There is a set of colored action eggs and a set of plain white eggs in the set. It will fun to see how they chose to perform each of the actions. A number of them can be demostrated in a variety of ways.

After creating one set of gross motor activities, it will be fun to build another. It will fun to see how many different algorithms you can build.

What is an algorithm?

An algorithm is a series of steps needed to complete a task. Computers follow algorithms step by step complete the actions and tasks we ask them to do. We can follow an algorithm too.

Downloading the Egg Carton Set

Building Egg Carton Algorithms set has been saved as a PDF. After downloading it, you will need to open it with a PDF reader. Many people like and use Acrobat Reader.

Getting the Gross Motor Egg Carton Algorithm Activities Ready

- - First, you will need to select the carton you wish your children to use.
  - Second, you will need to select the eggs you want your children to use.
  - Third, you will print out the carton and eggs you have selected.
  - Finally, you will need to laminate the carton and the individual eggs. This will allow you to use them over and over again.

Exploring the Algorithm Activities

Your children will need to cover each of the eggs in the bottom row with an action egg.
Then they will write the number of the times they will do each action on the egg right behind it in washable marker
Next, they will demonstrate their algorithm by doing the actions from left to right the number of times they said they would.
Once they have completed their algorithm, they can erase the numbers with a wet paper towel and remove the action eggs.
They are then ready to build a new algorithm.

If you like this coding activity, here are more you will love:

Three Pigs Blockly Block Worksheet

Magical Creatures STEM Coding Algorithm Drawing Activity

Drawing a Cat with a Looping Algorithm

How to Draw a Leprechaun with an Algorithm

Penguin Action Song and Gross Motor Activities

January 23, 2017 By Deirdre

Waddling Penguin Action Song and Gross Motor Activities

Your children are going to love these gross motor activities that will have them moving like penguins. They will have a great time flapping their arms and doing the other actions found on a set of penguin activity charts and action sequence cards I created. When they are done with them, they waddle around while reciting a fun penguin action song I found.

Gross Motor Activities

Let’s Move Like a Penguin Printable Set

Learning Each Action

This set of Let’s Move Like a Penguin gross motor activities can be used in a number of ways. You could start by having your children try to do the actions on each of the charts. That way you will know that they understand what each action is.

Waddling Penguin Action Song and Gross Motor Activity- This set contains 5 gross motor action poster and 4 gross motor sequence cards.

Waddling From One Action to the Next

Then you could place the action posters on the floor in a row. Your children could waddle from one action poster to the next. When they read an action poster, they can do that action.

Waddling Penguin Action Song and Gross Motor Activity- This set contains 5 gross motor action poster and 4 gross motor sequence cards. This is one of the sequence cards.

Action Sequence Cards

You will find a set of four action sequence cards in the printable set. You can hold up one card a time for your children to do. It is up to you as to whether they do the actions on each card once or over and over again. Children could place the cards around a room. Then they could waddle up to each card and do each sequence of actions.

Penguin Action Song

Children can move in a circle or around the room and recite this fun rhyme.

Waddling Penguin

(to tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, “ suit actions to words)

Penguins, penguins,
It’s so much fun
Waddling in the winter sun.
Waddling fast and waddling slow,
Waddling to and waddling fro.
Penguins, penguins,
Wish I were one,
Waddling in the winter sun.

The link below is an affiliate link.

This set of gross motor activities was created to go along with the book Penguin and Pinecone. (It is the Virtual Book Club book of the week.) Here are some more activities based on the book.

PENGUIN THEMED LITERACY IDEAS

Penguin Themed Alphabet Activity from The Educator’s Spin on It

PENGUIN THEMED MATHS IDEAS

Penguin Ice Flow Game – you are here!

Learning to Code with Penguin Game Boards from JDaniel4’s Mom

Building Shape Igloos for a Penguin from JDaniel4’s Mom

PENGUIN THEMED SENSORY AND PLAY

How to make a Penguin Sensory Bin from Mama Smiles

PENGUIN THEMED ART AND CRAFT ACTIVITIES

Penguin Painting from My Storytime Corner

Penguin Painting for Toddlers from Inspiration Laboratories

Here are some more wonderful books about penguins. (The links below are affiliate links.)

Christmas Activities – Jingle Bell Hop and Other Activities

December 14, 2016 By Deirdre

This post contains affiliate links.

After watching the movie or reading the book The Polar Express, your children may need to get up and move. I created a set of jingle cards that can be used to do a number of Christmas activities.

Christmas Activities

Gross Motor Activity

I had my son hop from bell to bell after laying out a number of cards like stepping stones. You could have your children choose to move in a variety of other ways.

Here some ways they could move:

skip
jump
trot
tip-toe
gallop
slide
jump

Tip: We tried to move from bell to bell while the bells hadn’t been taped down. You will want to tape the bells down so, they don’t slide around on the floor.

Concentration

You could write a number or letter on the bells. You will want to have two cards with each letter or number displayed on it. Then turn the cards upside down and have your children try to find each bells match.

Hide the Bell

You can hide a printout of the bell somewhere around your house or in your room. Then you can give you kids clues as to where to find it. When they get close to it, you can say that they are getting hot. When they get further away from it, you can say that they are getting cold.

Counting Workspace

Here are some ways to use the jingle bell printable to do several different Christmas activities:

You pass out a jingle bell printable and a cup of bells. Then have your children count on how many bells they have.
Next you could have them sort the bells into piles by color.
Finally you could have them place the bells on the arc on the inside of the bell with chopsticks.

Here are some more jingle bell Christmas activities to do with your kids:

Polar Express Printable -Jingle Bell Count

Preschool Science with Jingle Bells from Fun-A- Day

Jingle Bell Color Sorting from Sugar Aunts

Practice Gross Motor Skills Every Month of the Year

December 15, 2015 By Deirdre

There is one gross motor action card for each month of the year in this set of cards. Each month’s action focuses on a holiday or event that happen during that month. There are so many ways you could use these Practice Gross Motor Skills Every Month of the Year Activity (The set has been update and now looks a little different.)

Ways to Us the Gross Motor Skills Cards

You may decide to celebrate the new year by having your children do all of them.
You could pull out one card a month and introduce the monthly action.
You could start with January at the beginning of the year. Then in February you could share February’s and review January’s action. You could continue this process all year.
You could place your kids in twelve groups. Each group could decide on a way to act out each action. They could then share it with the class.

The goal of these cards is to get kids moving and have them work on their gross motor skills.

Things to Use with Each Gross Motor Skills Card

We are going to be doing each of the actions without props. If you have props that fit a months action you could use them.

Here are some props that would work for each month.

January

Night Cap and a bathrobe

February

A mirror could be held up so a child could see their heart shape.

March

A small bucket or bag to put the shamrocks in

April

A rain hat or boots

May

A piece of brown cardboard that represents dirt that kids could stand on

June

A pictures with signs of summer on sticks

July

Red, white and blue ribbon streamers on hoops or sticks

August

Blue shower curtain liner to stand on while swimming

September

Fabric or paper leaves to hold while falling

October

Plastic pumpkin shaped bucket or treat bag

November

Turkey headband

December

White shower curtain liner to lay down on to make angels

Here are some other gross motor activities found here on JDaniel4’s Mom:

Exploring Colors Outside

Counting Leaps

You will find more gross motor skills activities along with fine motor activities on my Early Learning Pinterest board.

Let’s Get Moving While Reviewing for a Spelling Test

August 28, 2015 By Deirdre

Earlier this week I shared a printable spelling ladder game along with some other spelling games that you can use with your children to review spelling words. For many kids it can be hard to sit down and review spelling words. (Yes, even with a game!) While I feel it is important to write words to review them, I think it is just a important to move. The activity grid shared in this post gives children a wide variety of ways that they can spell and move. There really isn’t one particular way to use this grid. Below you will find a few ways that I think can use it. I am sure that you can come up with an additional number of ways to use it with your kids to work on spelling words.

Here are some of the ways I think you can use the grid to review spelling words:

One activity could be selected for each spelling word you need to work on. The same activity could be repeated if you have more than fifteen words.
One activity could be chosen to do while each spelling word.
You can take turns picking the action that will be done.
If you have ten spelling words, you can do all the actions in the outside column.

Keeping Track of the Actions Selected

The link below is an affiliate link.

We used Learning Resources Two-Color Counters, Red/Yellow, Educational Counting, Sorting, Patterning, and Probability Activities, Set of 200, Grades K+, Ages 5+ to cover an action when we had completed it. You could easily print out the Spelling Action Grid and have your kids place or toss a counter on an activity. If you don’t have counters pom poms, buttons or milk caps would be great for covering the activity squares.

Don’t want to deal with counters. You can print out as many of these as you like and have your kids cross out each activity as they do it.

How did you select the actions?

I tried to select actions that worked with various sections of your children’s bodies. There actions that involved moving legs and feet. Several hand actions could be done standing up or sitting down. The crossing your arms and tapping your shoulders was selected because it has children crossing their body’s midline. Others were selected because they are just plain fun. Children love to flap, spin and march.