Developing Motor Skills - how to help your child with Body Awareness
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Why?
Body Awareness is necessary to know where our bodies are in relation to the world around us. It also helps us to know how much pressure to apply to objects and how to manipulate and hold objects. The following activities may help to encourage and develop body awareness:
- Encourage your child to identify body parts by naming, touching and moving
- Drawing around body parts, such as, hands, feet and whole body and filling in details
- Cutting out different body parts from magazines or similar
- Making bodies out of Play Doh, clay, paper mache, pipe cleaners or similar
- Encourage play with jigsaw puzzles of bodies and clothes and paper dolls
- Play games like Twister, Hokey Cokey, Simon Says, Head
Shoulders Knees and Toes, Globetrotter
- Roly poly games
- Musical statues, running and walking making the child stop in different positions, for instance, stop and touch the floor with different parts of the body – hand bottom feet
- Animal ‘walks’, such as: jump like a kangaroo, slither like a snake, crawl like a spider, stomp like an elephant
- Positions – assuming different positions: be as small, big, thin or wide as you can
- Make an obstacle course encouraging child to go over, through or under objects. General household objects can be easily adapted.
- Rough and tumble games
- Pushing and pulling games
- Move around with objects balanced on different parts of the body, for example, crawl/walk/run with beanbag balanced on head, hand or arm
- Visit play parks/centres to encourage children to move around different pieces of equipment