This is one of my favorite early intervention activities because it supports so many areas of child development all at once. It can help build language skills, cognitive skills, executive functioning, social skills, and motor development. In this post, I’m going to focus on perceptual motor skills, but I also want you to know how easily this simple activity can be adapted to support many other developmental skills through play.
Perceptual motor skills are how we coordinate our senses and motor skills to interact with the environment.
There are different areas of development within perceptual motor skills. The ones I’m going to focus on are
You may find that you will naturally incorporate bilateral coordination into this activity. If you’re wanting to intentionally focus on bilateral coordination, then you can think about the different movements that involve both sides of the body and then get creative in what animal might do an action like that. Your kids won’t even know that’s what you’re working on.
Here are some examples:
Talk about your body as you do this activity to bring greater body awareness. Make comparisons, for example, a dog has 4 legs, how many legs do you have? Asking questions and having a conversation will be for kids at FDLs 4-6. For kids that are not engaging in a lot of back and forth interactions, just label and model the language for them.
To bring more body awareness, when you give an instruction, focus on a specific body part. Here are some examples:
Motor planning is just a natural part of this activity as your child decides how he thinks each animal would move and then coordinating his body to move in that way.
If you want an extra activity that will help with motor planning, you can create an obstacle course. Throughout the obstacle course you can add animal actions into it. Here are some examples:
I hope you’ll get creative and have fun with this activity. You can make it as simple or elaborate as you want! The best thing is that you can change it up as much as you and your child want to while working on so many different developmental skills.
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This activity is great for kids at an FDL of: 1-6
The Functional Developmental Levels (FDL) are based on The PLAY Project and DIR/Floortime
This activity is great for kids primarily participating in stages: 1-6
The Stages of Play come from Parten’s Stages of Social Play.
This activity includes: vestibular and proprioception
Our senses include more than the usual 5 senses. Some kids may seek certain types of sensory input and/or avoid other types.
This activity is good for targeting the following developmental skills: communication, cognitive, executive functioning, motor, social
These are the main areas of child development addressed in the Early Intervention Tutorials
In this section, I will give you specific examples of what you can do in this activity to address specific areas of development.
