Building Gross Motor Play

As an early childhood teacher, I am currently doing a research class about the effects of Gross Motor Play in a primary classroom. The benefits of schools with a physical activity program compared to those schools who do not offer scheduled activity time. Our school is wonderful in the fact that it offers two sub areas for Gross Motor Play. Each class gets two daily times of 45 minutes on the playground (a morning session and an afternoon session). Our school also provides an indoor play session once a week through a company called Ultimate Play. For more information about indoor gym play with UPLAY. Throughout the year, we also take several field trips to the park!

In my class, we have come up with a few criteria that each teacher should know and be aware of in their class/school. It is important for teachers to know why children need Gross Motor Play and how to incorporate it into their daily schedules/routines.

Stretching Opportunities: Young children love the opportunity to build large muscles through balancing, running, jumping and climbing. Activities that involve stretching can help kids learn about bodily and spatial awareness.

Opening Up On Socialization: Be sure to include equal encouragement to both boys and girls for the same activities. Teachers should not show that a particular sport, such as football and baseball are strictly for boys. Kids want to test WHAT THEY CAN DO, even if it is gender preferred. At a young age, children will not understand why only boys/girls play this game and they can’t. Encourage both boys and girls to try each and every sport and to actively engage in the gross motor play.

Preventing Child Health Risks: Children need to be actively involved in gross motor participation for more than 30 minutes two daily. It is important to build a love of exercise and movement in order to prevent certain child health risks, one of them being child obesity. Childhood obesity is a condition in which a child is severely overweight for his/her age and affects over 30 million children a year. (Source)

Enhancing Outdoor Role Playing: One way to enhance dramatic play is to include it in your outside time. Set up an outdoor kitchen or gas station. You may notice that some students will combine role playing with gross motor play. For example, if a child is playing house and wants to bake a cake for a friend, she may have to drive her car to the grocery store to pick up the ingredients, causing her to circle the playground a few times. You can even ask them to do a stunt by crawling through a tunnel to get to the cash register or to the pick up line at a pretend drive thru. Be exciting and anticipate that the children can create their own learning environments.

Encouraging New Challenges: Every teacher should be aware of each child’s physical ability throughout the year. What is their gross motor progress? What are their accomplishment? Developing new challenges for young children is exciting and rewarding, but it can also be overwhelming. For example, trying to get a child to learn to ride a bike or climb the stairs to the BIG slide can be challenging to children who have never been in school before, if they are physical impaired or simply give up easily. On the flip side, teachers also have to see that if a child can already do these activities, what can they be challenged with? Encourage them to try a climbing wall or a swing. Can they use a jump rope or hoola-hoop?