Top Ten Blog Posts of 2017

It’s been a few years since we did a top ten list at the end of the year (that may be because for a few years we weren’t very consistent with posting). Since we managed to get out a post every week of this year (yes, we are patting ourselves on the back) we thought we would take a look back and see what posts were the most read by you our readers!

Here are our top 10 overall from 2017:

10.  Encouraging Rolling From Back to Stomach

9.  What Does High Tone Mean?

8. Easter Egg Hunt For Motor Skills

7.  Having a Ball with Core Muscle Strength

6.  Avoiding the ‘Container Shuffle’ with Your Baby

5.  My Child Isn’t Rolling Over:  Should I Be Concerned?

4.  A Multi-Tasking Activity

3.  A Glossary of Sitting

2. What Does Low Tone Mean?

1.Motor Learning: Stages of Motor Learning and Strategies to Improve Acquisition of Motor Skills

Interestingly enough, all of these were published prior to 2017, so I decided to dig a little deeper and find out our top ten that were published in 2017. Those are:

10. Halloween Inspired Gross Motor Games

9. Single Leg Stance

8. Transitional Movements

7. 10 Things You Didn’t Know a Pediatric PT Could Help With

6. Crossing Midline

5. Taking the Vision out of Balance

4. Core Workout: Hungry Hippos Meets Wreck it Ralph

3. Eccentric Abs (and no, I don’t mean odd!)

2. Ideas to Target the Core

1.Righting Reactions

Happy New Year, thanks for a great 2017 and we look forward to seeing you in 2018!

Halloween Inspired Gross Motor Games

Looking for some fun things to do with the kids that are Halloween Themed and will work on those gross motor skills? Check out these games!

Pumpkin Bowling: You can literally use a small round pumpkin or you can use a ball that is orange (if you don’t have one – get creative and make one to look like a pumpkin)! Have your kiddo stand at the designated spot (you can literally use a spot if you want), if you want to get really creative you can make it a gravestone or something else Halloween themed! This is where you can challenge their balance. Have them stand on on one foot, in tandem stance, or stand on a balance board or dynadisc, have them stand backwards and roll the ball through their legs – the point is get creative and have fun! Have them roll the pumpkin to knock over the ghosts. This can be paper towel rolls or white cups with ghosts faces drawn on them. You can stack them in pyramid style or set them out in traditional bowling pin formation. We’d love to see pictures of your set up!

Spider Web Walk: We’ve talked about this one before and there are lots of ways you can make it more or less challenging for the kids. Use tape to draw a spider web on the floor and find challenging ways to walk around the web. Read more here.

Witch Hat Ring Toss: Buy some witches hats or cover athletic cones in black construction paper to make your own. Same as with pumpkin bowling (read above for ways to work on balance) create a starting point and then have your child try to throw a ring onto the witches hat. You can have one hat that they have to get multiple rings on, or have multiple hats set out that they have to try to toss towards. Let’s see how many ringers they can get!

Pumpkin Patch Stomp:  Blow up some orange balloons (you can draw on them if you want to make them look more like pumpkins) and try to stomp on them! To make it a little easier you can put some sand or water in the balloon so they won’t move away as easily. The more air in the balloon, the easier it is to pop, but if it is less full, its easier for the child to get and keep their foot on it. You might want to have a mix of balloons to vary the difficulty.

Pumpkin Walk: Have your child try to walk across the room, or on a balance beam while balancing a baby pumpkin on their head. You can also change this to Witches Hat Walk and make a witches hat out of an athletic cone and do the same thing (the hat might be easier for the little ones because it has a flat bottom)

Spider Web Crawl: Use toilet paper or white streamers to create a web across a hallway. Have your kids try to crawl over and under without breaking the web! For some other ideas read more here.

Some Game Ideas with a Halloween Theme

 

In case you need to fill some time between school and trick or treating or just want to provide some new activities for your child to explore instead of hearing them plead for just one more piece of candy, here are some ideas!

1. Play Freeze with Monster Mash: Put on everyone’s favorite Halloween tune and call out a position they have to freeze in each time you pause the music.  For example, standing on one foot, bear position, crab position, or roll up like ball, etc. It’s up to you how long to have them freeze and challenge their core muscles and balance in different positions.

2.  Pumpkin Play: If you are done with your pumpkins for decoration (and they aren’t too rotten), you can let your children explore different ways to play with them.  With smaller pumpkins, you can play bowling.  You can use any objects around the house for bowling pins, such as empty plastic bottles with a little rice in the bottom.  If they want they can even decorate the pins to go with the halloween theme.  Another idea would be to play ring toss using pumpkins that have longer stems.  You can cut rings out of cardboard or maybe you have rings from another game that you can take out and toss over to the pumpkin stem. I’m sure once you get started playing with pumpkins, your kids with think of a few to add to the list!

3.  Spider Web Challenge: Using painter’s tape, you can make a spider web on the floor inside or outside and mark off a clear start and finish.  If you have any plastic spiders around for Halloween, place them in the holes of the web scattered around or you can make spiders out of paper.  Ask your child to walk along the web (tape) while picking up the spiders along the way.  This challenges balance to walk on a narrow line as well as by having to reach down and outside the base of support for the spiders without stepping off the web.

 

If this sparks your creativity and you come up with other fun Halloween games we would love to hear about it! Happy Halloween!