Are you looking for some fun and inexpensive activities for your kids to do this summer. Well, today I have three ideas for you. All of the supplies for these activities can be purchased at The Dollar Tree or any big box store like Wal-Mart, Target, or Amazon.
bubbles
Blowing bubbles is one of my favorite games to play with kids. When kids blow bubbles they are working on several important skills at one time:
- Oral Motor Skills: Bubbles strengthen the muscles in and around the mouth. These muscles help with talking, chewing, and swallowing.
- Breath Support: Successfully blowing a bubble requires kids to take nice deep breaths. These deep breaths engage those all important core muscles in and around the central part of the body.
- Eye Hand Coordination: In order to place the bubble wand into the container and bring it up to their mouth, kids must practice their eye hand coordination skills. Their eyes must follow or track the bubble want and use the correct muscle activation and force to bring it up to their mouth.
Bubbles are also a great way to work on gross motor skills like stomping, kicking, and jumping. Blow bubbles to your child and ask them to pop them by stomping or kicking them with their foot or jumping up and grabbing them.
Sidewalk Chalk
Sidewalk Chalk is a great way for kids to explore their creative side while encouraging their motor development. When kids are presented with a giant canvas, they can let their imaginations run while as their create a masterpiece. While they create they are working on:
- Core Muscle Strength: As kids reach and shift their bodies around to draw a giant rainbow or self-portrait muscles on the central part of their body are working hard to keep them stable.
- Engaging our core muscles and keeping them strong in important for our posture, breathing, and moving our bodies.
- Just like Bubbles, Sidewalk Chalk requires that kids use their hands and eyes together to create.
- Fine Motor Skills: Drawing is one of many fine motor skills that kids develop in childhood. Fine motor skills require kids to use the small muscles of the hand and wrist to control and manipulate the chalk.
Sidewalk chalk is a great tool to create outdoor obstacles courses to practice gross motor skills like walking on a line, jumping, and hoping. Check out this video with some great obstacle course ideas.
Beach Ball
Who doesn’t love to throw a beach ball around? There are countless numbers of games that can be played with a beach ball from simply throwing it back and forth, to volleyball, kickball, hot potato, etc. Working on ball skills helps kids develop:
- Coordination: The ability to use different parts of our body together smoothly and efficiently is the definition of coordination. Ball skills require kids to use their hand, eyes, feet, arms, legs, etc in order to catch, kick, or throw a ball.
- Graded Control: Our body’s ability to use the correct amount of force to complete a task is the definition of graded control. When throwing or kicking a ball to a friend, kids learn how to create the right amount of forced to get the ball to their desired location.
The best part of using beach balls to work on ball skills is that you can control easily how much air is in the ball. For kids that have difficulty grasping balls, try letting some air out of beach ball to make it a little easier.
Thanks so much for stopping by today. Make sure to share your inexpensive summer activities in the comments below.
-Heather