15 Great Gross Motor Activities To Build Skills This Summer

Are you looking for something to keep your little one busy this summer? As a parent, it can be difficult to come up with activities to keep your kiddo entertained. Why not have your child focus on developing their gross motor skills? To help guide you in the right direction, pediatric therapist, Cait Parr has compiled a list of 15 gross motor activities to build skills this summer! From an indoor obstacle course to making a hopscotch game with chalk, these exciting summertime activities will boost physical development while keeping your child engaged and active. Let’s get started!

What Are Gross Motor Skills?

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Gross motor skills involve the large arms, legs, and trunk muscles, such as sitting, walking, and running. They also include higher-level skills such as climbing, skipping, throwing, and catching a ball. 

When a child’s gross motor development is delayed, pediatric physical therapy is often prescribed to help a child work towards gaining gross motor skills. A physical therapist works on an array of foundational skills to help a child maximize his or her gross motor potential, including: 

• Balance
• Muscular Strength and Endurance
• Motor Learning and Planning
• Body Awareness
• Sensory Processing
• Coordination
• Postural Control
• Muscle Tone
• Crossing the Mid-Line (moving arms or legs across the middle of the body to perform a task)

Gross Motor Activities for Indoor or Outdoor Play

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Here are 15 indoor and outdoor gross motor activities that will keep your child engaged and progressing toward the goals you and your pediatric physical therapist have set.

1. Simon Says

Simon Says is a fun way to help your child improve body awareness and movement planning.

Start by having your child point to specific body parts and imitate the poses you demonstrate. Once your child can imitate your modeled direction, increase the challenge by just saying the action, you want your child to execute. 

2. Dancing

Dancing is a way to work on gross motor skills while simultaneously expressing freedom and creativity and teaching a sense of rhythm. Choose songs you know your child will enjoy, including specific movements, like “I’m a Little Teapot” and “Hokey Pokey.”

Dancing will help develop balance, coordination, sensory processing, motor learning and planning, and body awareness.

3. Walk Like an Animal or Wheelbarrow Walking

Walk like a bear on all fours to the bathtub. Crab walk to your bed. Wheelbarrow walk to the car. Animal walks are a great way to develop upper body strength, body awareness, and overall coordination.  

4. Homemade Obstacle Course

Whether used as an indoor gross motor activity or outside, setting up a miniature obstacle course with objects found around the house is a great way to build several gross motor skills into one activity.

Pillows make great stepping stones, Outdoor Gross Motor Activities for Toddlers & Kids

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Parents, do you look out at your backyard and see only work to be done? Toys to pick up, out-of-control weeds, a playhouse needing repairs, a grass lawn desperate for a trim… 

Well, your pediatric physical therapists here at NAPA see your backyard in a different light — a world of opportunity for your child or toddler to engage in these gross motor activities!

The possibilities are endless when thinking up gross motor activities, but here is a list of 11 outdoor gross motor activities to help develop gross motor skills for your child or toddler. To get you started, these seven gross motor activities involve sidewalk chalk! 

5. Drawing on the Ground with Chalk

Draw on the ground, either sitting or lying on your belly. Bearing weight on the non-dominant hand as they draw with the dominant hand strengthens the non-dominant side.

• How to make it easier: draw together! With your hand over your child’s hand, draw a big rainbow together to encourage your child to use full arm range of motion. 
• How to make it harder: draw with a non-dominant hand!

6. Draw a Balance Beam with Chalk

Just draw a long straight line with chalk, and ta-da! Instant balance beam! 

Encourage your child to try to walk on the line without stepping off. 

• Easiest: just keeping one foot on the line the whole way 
• A little harder: both feet stay on the line, putting one foot in front of the other with each step!  
• Tricky: the heel of the front foot must touch the toe of the back foot. This tandem stance is a real challenge to balance. 
• Advanced: walking along a line and toe-tapping on red solo cups or paper towel rolls placed on both sides of the line 
• Super advanced: walking backward or sideways along the line (Try a squiggly line ~~~~~~ getting fancy!)

To take the balance beam up a level, use a curb or low retaining wall instead of a line on the concrete for an additional balance challenge.

7. Make A Hopscotch Game with Chalk

Targets balance, coordination, hopping, jumping, sequencing, timing, and visual system 

• Jumping forward over the line from one square to the next.
• To work on jumping farther, try jumping over a square (say, “The LAVA square will burn your feet! Better jump over it to the safe square!”) 
• Jumping with feet together, then apart, and back together develops coordination.
• Harder: hopping on one foot requires single-leg balance AND muscle power.
• Hardest: combining all in one – one foot, two feet, together and apart!

8. Make a Racetrack! 

A track for their ride-on toy, trike, bike, or scooter – tracing the chalk line wherever it goes targets motor planning and bilateral coordination for steering.

Riding a bike or scooter improves coordination, endurance, and overall strengthening. 

9. Sidewalk Chalk Obstacle Course 

Putting all these sidewalk chalk ideas together – walking the chalk line, jumping through hopscotch squares, stomping on some chalk circles, drawing hand and footprints to walk on, or any other ideas from the picture below will encourage gross motor movement with a variety of activities all in one.

10. Backyard Twister Made From Chalk

Works on color recognition, knowing left and right, and motor planning required to arrange their body to reach each color. Reaching and stretching, bearing weight in unique positions, and balancing to maintain these positions work the vestibular sense and target strengthening! 

• Draw chalk circles on the ground. Lots of smaller circles everywhere make it easier for smaller bodies, like toddlers, but bigger kids can play with fewer and bigger circles. 
• Randomly call out left or right, then hand or foot, and then a color. Each player has to place the corresponding hand or foot on the circle of that color! 
• Keep going until someone falls, and then play it again! 

11. Better Ball Skills 

Roll with It! 

• Draw a chalk design on the ground, the fence, the side of the house, or wherever is allowed in your family, and then have your child trace the design made by rolling a ball along it.
• If the design is on the ground, try first on hands and knees. 
• Too easy? Try on hands and feet, with knees up off the ground, for increased arm strengthening.
• If the design is on a vertical surface like a fence or side of the house, have your child trace it while in tall kneeling, half kneeling, or standing on only one leg.
• Try adding a dynamic surface like a couch cushion from patio furniture (sitting, kneeling, or standing on it, or even standing with only one leg).
• Another way to roll with it: with both hands on the wall, place a ball between your kiddo’s knee and the wall or fence and have them roll the ball up and down the wall by bending and straightening their knee – strengthens hip flexors and core.

Throw It.

Pick a target, any target, just not a window! Pick which arm will be their throwing arm, then have the kiddo STEP forward with the opposite foot, POINT at the target with the opposite hand and arm, LOOK at the target so their ball knows where to go and THROW at the target. Step, point, look, and throw – we say it as we play it so the motor plan will stick! Hand-over-hand guidance can help encourage beginner throwers! 

Shoot It.

We don’t need a hoop to play basketball! Gardening buckets, the kiddie pool, a chair with arms, anything can be a basket for basketball. Or you can duct tape a pool noodle to make a circle, and there’s your basketball hoop! 

Kick It.

Soccer play targets single-leg balance to kick with one foot and motor planning to coordinate where we want the ball to go. Any spot in the yard can be a soccer goal!  

Hit It.

Modify baseball with a pool noodle as a bat and your choice of a ball: 

• Regular balloons – these “baseballs” move slowly, making it easier to coordinate movements in time to hit.
• Beach balls are usually faster than balloons, but still allow increased time for motor planning as kids learn this skill.
• Water balloons are typically much smaller targets and, therefore, harder to hit, but they may come with a fun splash if they get hit just right! 

12. Playing Catch

Catch is a time-tested tradition and a great way to improve gross motor skills. Start with more giant balls and gradually make them smaller as your child’s skill level increases. Use balloons, deflated beach balls, or soft, spongy balls for children still mastering catching – they move slower and are more forgiving if a catch is missed. If your child picks up the catching and throwing movements quickly, consider increasing the challenge by having them stand on a squishy surface (pillow, couch cushion) or one leg while playing.  ​

13. Gardening 

• Pulling weeds or picking dandelions – targets arm strength and anticipatory postural responses to maintain their balance! 
• Collect sticks or wood chips from all over – repetitively squatting to pick something up strengthens legs and improves balance. 
• Water play – fill a bucket, have your kiddo carry it around to help water the plants, and secretly work on strengthening!
• Just playing in the dirt – holding a deep squat is excellent for ankle stability, and getting messy is great sensory play!

14. Get Outdoorsy

• Navigating up and down hills or across uneven surfaces like grass or gravel builds strength and endurance. 
• Sidestepping or forward stepping over rocks encourages balance and ankle strengthening. 
• Lying in the grass, encourage your kiddo to army crawl/ slither like a snake and sneak up on an unsuspecting family member. Army crawl engages the entire body and strengthens the core and arm muscles. 
• Playing barefoot in a sandbox strengthens ankles and legs – especially while squatting, jumping, and digging holes with feet. 

15. Mastering the Monkey Bars

Got a play set with monkey bars? This is a fantastic opportunity to work on arm and core strength, coordination, and motor planning! 

1. First, help your child get used to holding onto one bar. Swinging or counting to ten helps develop grip and arm strength to support their weight.  
2. Next, support their body weight by holding them while they practice reaching through with one hand on each bar. This develops coordination to reach through with their hands and look for the next bar without the work of supporting their own body weight. 
3. Practice the swing through. Only one hand on each bar may seem harder, but when they get two hands on the same bar, kids tend to turn off their core, stopping the momentum they have going and making it more work to move to the next bar. Swinging through with one hand on each bar teaches efficient use of momentum and keeps the core engaged, decreasing the work of hands and arms. 
4. Practice makes perfect! Repetition is vital to help kiddos get going across the bars.

Bonus round: lifting knees to chest works deep abdominal muscles responsible for balance, posture, and toileting (and kids can practice this anywhere there’s a sturdy bar to hang onto) 

With these 15 therapeutic gross motor skills activities in your back pocket, outdoor playtime can help your kiddo develop their gross motor skills! Tag us in your backyard adventures on Instagram, @napacenter! We can’t wait to play together again soon! 

SHOP: Our Top Picks On Amazon – Gross Motor Activities

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About The Author

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Cait Parr is a pediatric physical therapist at NAPA Center. Her favorite animal is snails, because they remind her to slow down and enjoy the beautiful details about life. She loves desserts almost as much as she loves long walks with her husband on the beach at sunset.

Thank You

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We want to extend our gratitude to thank you for stopping by today!

What other gross motor activities have you tried this summer? Do you have any more activities to recommend?  We are curious! Let us know in the comments below. Your input helps other fellow readers. ♥

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