In these last few days before Travis starts summer camp, we’ve been doing lots of gross motor skills here at “Camp Mom“. Here are a few great ways to get moving in the heat!

Hula-Hoop Workshop:

Forgot traditional twirls around the waist; hula hoops are a fantastic summer boredom buster even if your kids haven’t mastered the hip swirling yet.

To wit, today the kids decided to pretend they were the rings of Saturn with hula hoops!

Simply put a hula hoop around your waist and spin!

You can also practice rolling a hula hoop along the ground. Or jumping from one to the other. Hula hoops are fun any way you spin it!

Jumping Bee:

Even if your child doesn’t know how to skip rope yet, you can turn it into a prop for a spelling bee. We laid the rope down on the ground and I had Travis think back to some of his kindergarten sight words. For each letter in a word, he jumped back and forth across the rope.

He was so proud recalling sight words. “There is a sight word of the day and the sight word is ‘the’,” he sang to the tune of BINGO. T!

H!

E!

After we’d gone through sight words, little sister Veronika started shouting out silly words for him to spell. Bigger kids, of course, can do this activity with longer words and while truly honing their jump rope skills. Last person still spelling without getting tangled in his or her rope wins!

Dribbling King:

Some cheap bouncy balls from the grocery store were the perfect prompt to work on Travis’s dribbling skills. Take this activity to your nearest park and hop on the basketball court (or just outline a large area with chalk) and show your kids how to dribble.

If you want to make it a competition, have the kids dribble with one hand while trying to knock away an opponent’s ball with the other.

Travis got very protective of his ball when we played this wat though, and preferred to hone his new skills solo.

Play “Spud”:

If you need a reminder on this classic, here are the rules: The player who is IT tosses a ball in the air and shouts out a number. Other players can take that many steps away.

Now, IT tries to hit another player with the ball (choose a relatively soft one). If IT misses, he or she gets an S.

If IT makes the shot, the other player gets the S and is now IT. Play continues until someone spells out S-P-U-D.

I hope these ideas get you moving!