Gross Motor Learning Hop

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We live in New England where the Winter months are typically snowy, dreary, and incredibly cold. I could easily snuggle up on the couch with a warm blanket, a hot beverage, and my favorite cuddly boys watching movies all day, but usually my high-energy toddler would prefer to be doing something else. After being cooped up inside all day, his interests are mostly of the running, jumping, screaming variety. As part of the Gross Motor Activities from A to Z series hosted by one of my very favorite bloggers Still Playing School, Our letter is H! H is for hop, currently one of my toddlers favorite gross motor movements. Because of this, I put together a super fun and easy gross motor learning hop. 

I am super excited to share this activity because of its versatility. This really only requires some paper, crayons/markers/colored pencils, tape, and some toys you have around your house! (We used animals from the Fisher-Price Little People Zoo Talkers Animal Sounds Zoo, the Fisher Price Little People A to Z Learning Zoo Playset, and Wild Republic Polybags)  To create the activity, I wrote out the alphabet and numbers 1-10 in different colored crayon. Then I taped them all to the floor in a maze design. You can tape them however you choose! Then we were ready to start our gross motor activities. There is so much you can do with this set up. Kingston likes activities dealing with letters, numbers, colors, and animals, so we got right to it! 

Alphabet Hop 

The first activity we did was hop the alphabet! I called out the letter, K repeated the letter, and then he hopped to it. This was a fantastic activity for letter recognition and he enjoyed following the maze pattern around our living room.

Alphabet Recognition Hop

I called out different letters, and K had to find them and hop onto them. He would call out the letter as he hopped! This worked on recognition even further by making him seek out a particular letter out of order.

Alphabet Color Hop

For this activity, we combined both letter recognition and color recognition. We did this activity two ways. The first way, I told him to find all of the letters that were a certain color. For example, "Kingston find the orange letters." As he found one, he would hop on it and say its name. Then we played a less structured game where he jumped on any letter he wanted and called out its name and color.

Number Hop 

Numbers are something that we still struggle a bit with, so our number hop was pretty simple. K hopped from each number and we called out its name. After he was done, we went through and looked at the spelling of each word (included underneath the number).

Animal Alphabet Hop

This activity was by far his favorite and is perfect for any animal lover. You could easily use items around your house that begin with that specific letter if you don't have a wide variety of animals!

To play, K selected an animal and we named it. Then we sounded out the first letter, and I told him what it started with. Then he set off to find that letter and place the animal on it.

He had a really fun time running back and forth, hopping over animals, and finding their homes! It was a great indoor energy buster. 

We had an animal for every letter, so the effect at the end was great. We went through and called out the different animal names and letters they started with. K loved that they each had a "home" on their letter square. 

Animal Counting Game

The last activity we did was an animal counting game. We found the animals we had that were in specific families and grouped them on their number. Some of the animals had babies attached to them which were included in the counts. You could do this with colors too, sorting coordinated colored objects on the different numbers.

Don't forget to check out the 24 other gross motor activities in this amazing series! 

On top of all of these exciting activities, Discount School Supply is giving one lucky winner a Parachute Play Pack! This is just perfect for all of your gross motor fun! Enter using the Rafflecopter form below!

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