Large motor activities for infants are beneficial for your babies to grow their skills and health in the first years of life.
They can assist the infants in knowing how to stand up, sit up, run, or walk.
You can help your children develop large motor abilities by providing exciting motor skills to learn and play.
You can witness a drastic change from a small baby to a confident kid with excellent abilities and skills, thanks to these motor activities.
This improves the baby’s effort and power, using their core muscle groups and skills.
Thus, this article will suggest 10 gross motor activities for your babies with their features and benefits. Scroll down for details!
What Are Large Motor Activities For Infants?
They are the activities for babies to regulate the muscle groups to do basic motions like jumping, crawling, and walking.
These activities aid in developing your baby’s gross motor skills, which are necessary for the development of their big muscles and core parts, including the legs, arms, head, hands, and brains.
Large motor activities are useful for how infants gain these required skills through experience.
While making your baby engaged and interested, these motor practices can enable them to enhance their skills and health.
Popular motor activities you can guide and play with your little ones include rolling a ball, kicking a balloon, pushing and pulling, or playing with colors.
10 Large Motor Activities For Infants
1. Play With Blocks
Block play is one of the infant large motor activities that are useful for cognitive development, emotional, and physical improvements, and social skill development.
It fosters independent learning and rational thinking, including classification, comparisons, representation, and symbolization.
Babies can enhance their vocabularies and math skills and learn balance, geometry, and gravity by playing with the blocks.
When constructing numerous structures, infants also know how to describe locations, colors, sizes, or forms.
Blocks are available in various sizes and arranged in different ways. An infant can play with a large block by combining two smaller blocks.
This is a great method to explain the concepts of small and big as well as whole and half.
Blocks also attract most infants because they can move them from one area to another.
Thus, encourage your child to crawl towards a tower with blocks that are a little out of reach. Keep one or two blocks near your infant for extra encouragement or better support.
2. Pull And Push
Pushing and pulling items are amazing gross motor activities that can assist your children in developing their skills.
It’s a super simple exercise to play and learn without any setup. Infants learn to repeat the same actions, including two basic actions pulling and pushing.
The typical push toys your infant can use include spinning tops, riding toys, small paper balls, giant balls, or simple activities promoting great motor abilities.
The babies can play with toys with strings for pushing toys, such as buses, plastic animals, trains, or trucks.
You can also make your pull-and-push active games and toys for your babies.
The infants can push and pull these toys simply to develop their arms, chest, hands, legs, thighs, and heads.
3. Crawl Through A Tunnel
Crawling is one of the infant’s natural abilities critical to their growth.
It is the start in the sequence of activities for gross motor skills for infants, promoting the development of bilateral coordination skills and a strong core for gross motor activity.
This activity encourages your babies to crawl while making a balance, enhancing fast reflexes and great motor abilities.
The tunnels are creative and versatile with various designs such as tractors, octopuses, sharks, and cars.
Crawling through a tunnel is funny and beneficial to the thorough development of your babies.
Encourage your child to crawl by sitting on the opposite side of the tunnel and applauding, singing, and juggling toys. Do everything your baby enjoys and help them to play.
You can buy the available tunnels or rent one. You can also build a tunnel with an empty box by opening it on both sides or covering two chairs or a table with a blanket.
4. Play Musical Instruments
Stimulating your baby to play music is one of the best ways you can follow to nurture their development and contribute to a great heart.
The music gives your little one different advantages of emotion and spirit. Playing with music triggers your child’s brain and assists in the development of neural networks.
These gross motor activities babies also aid in concentration and awareness, as beat and rhythms provide a smooth sense.
Playing instruments is the ideal method that helps a child improve their confidence, self-discipline, and better mental health..
Drums are an excellent choice for babies because they are strong to drop or pummel. Their terrific sound also encourages the child to play their favorite beats and rhythms.
Get the drum stick and demonstrate how to make funny sounds with it. Instruct your baby to play the instrument by holding the stick in the proper posture.
5. Make Tummy Time With Sensory Bags
Tummy time is beneficial for developing your baby’s back, neck, muscles, and shoulder.
As one of the large motor skills activities for infants, it also contributes to the prevention of motor delays and disorders like twisted necks.
Tummy time sensory bags are a quick and easy method to bring sensory play into your house. It’s a fantastic technique to make the tummy time more enjoyable.
You can try out a few different designs, with the greatest part being affordable to make.
You can use various materials such as pom-poms, paint, rice, or straws to stuff the bags.
Besides, some things you can fill in the sensory bags include water, oil, cereal, glitter, and wooden beads. When everything is in the bags, playing with them is safe for your child.
6. Play With Colors
Vibrant colors make your infant’s life exciting and express how they feel.
Color plays an important role in influencing what your child does and what they love. It is significant for sensitive children’s minds.
By using the right hues, you can draw children’s attention with ease. The colors also support the receptivity, development, and emotions of infants.
Most infants enjoy experimenting with different hues. Take a medium-sized paper sheet and some watercolor paints.
Place them in front of your children and help them make masterpieces with magical colors.
Art projects also allow infants to relax and strengthen their hand muscles in various ways.
7. Roll A Ball
Among large motor gross motor activities for infants, this is best suited for babies who can sit up firmly, aging from six to eight months old.
When your little angel can keep balance and hold the ball, they like rolling the ball with you every time. Place your child opposite you and roll a ball for them.
Demonstrate how you roll the ball to your baby and urge them to do the same. You can give your baby a sensory ball that provides an additional touch of fascination for them.
8. Kick Balloon
Another great motor activity is baby balloon kicking. It is useful for eye tracking skills and recognition of cause and effect when kicking or moving a balloon.
This exercise is simple, and your baby will find it amusing to giggle aloud.
You should tie a helium-filled balloon around the baby’s legs to do this physical activity. Lay your little angels on their backs and let them look up at the balloon.
Apart from greater eye tracking, it also supports their attention span. Plus, it’s quite simple to set up and makes your infant interested.
This game also will help to improve skill while the baby growing up.
This game will support the baby on kicking ball skills when you take him to outdoor games such as Hampton Road Soccer activity.
9. Pom Pom Play
Pom poms provide various methods to play with your infant. Fill a large gallon-sized bottle with multicolored buttons and pom-poms to create a funny noise.
Stimulate and cheer your baby to play with it. The pom-poms’ colors appeal to them, and your child enjoys the sounds it makes as they shake or roll them over the floor.
It’s fantastic for teaching gross motor development skills because it piques the infant’s interest. This activity can also be ideal for your baby to play and learn enjoyable things.
10. Play On Playground
Playing on the playground has numerous advantages for infants. For example, it assists kids in learning how to stay balanced and constantly move their legs back and forth.
Wobbling bridges and rope ladders are versatile playground equipment you want to encourage your baby to perform.
Despite making your infant scary, they also serve to strengthen the torso and larger muscles.
As infants are not familiar with playgrounds full of toys and games, you’d better ensure the playground safety, especially for the very first time.
Conclusion
Practicing large motor activities for infants will help them achieve great targets as well as develop their skills and thoughts.
It would be better if you engage in activities with your baby! It improves an infant’s gross motor skills and brings you joy when observing your baby kicking a balloon, rolling the ball, and crawling through a tunnel.
Playing together also brings unforgettable memories. You can see your child’s steady development of gross motor abilities that make you motivated.
What are your favorite motor activities to play with your baby? Share your greatest gross motor skill development tricks with us!