Gross motor activities, or physical activities, are one of my most searched types of activities in the winter months. It’s tough to be cooped up at home with energetic kids who can barely last five minutes out in the cold, yet need another 45 minutes of high-energy play.

What Are Gross Motor Activities?

Gross motor activities are any activity that use large muscle groups like the core, arms, and legs. The ability to use these large muscle groups is known as gross motor skills.

Gross motor skills are important for children’s development because they lay the foundation for kids to gain the ability to walk, run, move, and also use fine motor muscles.

Kids need practice to develop good control over their bodies. One way to do this is by doing balancing activities.

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Why Kids Need to Develop Good balance

Having good balance comes with practice, especially through play!

I want my girls to develop good balance to keep them strong, be more coordinated, and have good posture for spinal alignment and long term health.

These qualities are all important not only for being able to do physical activities like playing sports, but for simple things like being able to sit upright at a table and concentrate on a fine motor activity.

4 Alphabet Themed Relay Races

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I love combining gross motor activities with letter learning. We’ve done all kinds of alphabet games and races, like this Post-It Race.

Today I wanted to work on my two-year-old’s balancing skills along with letter recognition.

We had recently played hopscotch with this same alphabet puzzle mat to learn letter names.

I took the letters out of the mat for our relay races.

The basic set up of all four of these activities is two baskets placed on either end of the room. One has foam letters, and the other is empty.

Ella had to choose a letter from the first basket, name it correctly, and then race it over to the basket at the opposite end of the room.

All four activities are done the same way.

But the middle part is where the balancing magic happens.

1. Balance Beam

We installed our wood floors ourselves (I know! We’re crazy!) and had several planks left over. I grabbed one of these and laid it flat on the floor to make a nice, safe balance beam for Ella to walk on as she transferred a letter from one basket to the other.

The board is about five inches across. We’ve used this board as a balance beam numerous times, and Ella is pretty good at using them now!

She was able to use her arms for balance very easily as she is almost 3 years old. The first time I had her walk the balance beam, she needed me to hold her hand. I explained that she could hold her arms out to help her balance, and with practice, she got it!

If you don’t have a wood board to use as a balance beam, a tape line will work. I would encourage getting one, however, as it’s just more fun even if you’re not trying to do a relay!

2. Pillow Path

The pillow path uses the same set up as before with the baskets on either end of the blanket. Instead of a balance beam in the middle, we made a path of several pillows to walk on.

We normally don’t play this game in this room, but it had the best lighting for the camera so… 🙂

But this is why we used these flat pillows. To make it more challenging, we’d use different kinds of pillows and couch cushions.

The variety of levels and pillow densities will make this simple balancing activity a lot more challenging! Pile on the pillows if you really want your kids to go crazy!

3. Zigging and Zagging

Our final two alphabet relay races use good ol’ painter’s tape. I taped a very uneven zig zag on the blanket between the baskets.

Then I challenged Ella to walk the zig zag line to transfer the letters from one basket to the other.

She kind of shimmied along the line the first few times, but then she began walking toe-to-heel style like I first thought she would.

4. Ladder Hop

The point of this one was to get Ella to hop or skip from tape line to tape line. We’d already done several gross motor exercises though, and I think she was just getting tired because she just calmly walked across instead of hopping!