Movement Time
Activity: Flying in Space
Materials:
Optional Balls/ Balloons
Click Here for Laurie Berkner’s “Rocket Ship Run” – a great addition to this activity!
Skill Check
The goal of this activity is to see if your child can lay on their stomach and hold their head, arms, and legs off the ground. Try modeling the position yourself to show them what you are asking!
If you can, orient yourself so you are face to face with each other to increase opportunities to interact with each other during the activity.
Next, see if your little astronaut can coordinate both sides of their body and do “astronaut swimming” with you!
Expanding Skills
If your child seems ready for more you can up the challenge by rolling ball/balloon “planets” to your child for them to “blast” away! Try and aim for both sides of their body to get both of their hands active in the activity.
Want to add a cognitive challenge to the task? Make them “unlock” the planet by guessing the color/shape/number you are thinking of in your head. Practicing “password” games such as this is a fun way to encourage your child to build their categorical thinking – just don’t make them guess too many times that they lose interest!
Table Time
Activity: Rocket Ship Names
Materials:
Legos (can be substituted with blocks or unifix cubes)
Letter stickers (can be substituted with tape and marker)
Prep:
Stick or write the letters of your child’s name onto Legos, one letter per Lego. Make a set for you and a set for your child.
Skill Check
Begin with handing your child the letters of their name in order for them to stacking on top of each other. Model saying each letter out loud as you stack them up.
See if you can encourage your child to stack the Legos as well; a silly way to encourage participation is to have a countdown and then blast your rocket ship up into space!
If successful so far, start again but this time say the next letter and see if they can identify it from 2 or 3 options.
Expanding Skills
If they are successful so far try offering them all of the letters in their name at the same time and see if they can put them in order themselves!
If your child is ready for more of a challenge try adding more letters to the mix and building rocket ship “word families”. These are usually 3 or 4 letter rhyming words, such as words that end in -at, -an, or -ad.
Creative Time
Activity: Painting in the Night Sky
Materials:
Dark Blue Construction Paper
Paintbrush
Paper Plate
Shaving Cream (about 1.5 cups)
Elmer’s glue (about .5 cup)
Flour (about .5 cup)
Yellow Crayon or Star Stickers
Prep:
Draw or stick stars randomly around paper to look like “night sky”.
Skill Check
Squeezing out the glue and shaving cream promotes hand strengthening and scooping and dumping the flour is a wonderful opportunity for practicing their motor planning and bilateral coordination! Encourage your child to participate in portioning and mixing these 3 ingredients together to create a puffy space paint.
Join your child in using the paintbrushes, or even their hands, in decorating their night skies with some beautiful puffy clouds.
Try modeling drawing straight lines and circles in the clouds and encourage your child to do the same!
Expanding Skills
Practice creating more challenging shapes such as squares and plus signs; these are still important precursors to handwriting!
See if your child can recognize letters or even simple sight words drawn in the clouds.
If your child seems ready to expand even further, practice painting their name in uppercase letters. Rather than the popular “connect the dot” style tracing, instead use a light colored crayon for a more visually supportive solid line to trace.
Floortime Play
Activity: Blastoff!
Materials:
Couch, bed, or cushy pile of pillows and blankets to safely crash into
Skill Check
Initiate a game of “Blastoff” with your child, including a 10-second countdown and being thrown up then “crashed” into a safe surface. If your child is usually nervous about activities like this try holding them in your arms as you jump up and down or even try crashing together!
If your child is laughing and enjoying the activity, see if you can pause or slow down the interaction to encourage them to reinitiate the game. In the beginning, honor any attempts to communicate they want to continue the game and build off of that!
Expanding Skills
See if you can encourage your child to talk about “where” you should blast off too – see this week’s movement lesson for a link to Laurie Berkner’s Rocket Ship Run, which is a fun way to introduce this idea!
If your child is ready to increase the challenge see if they will engage in problem solving with “playful obstructions”. Pretend your rocket ship has run out of gas, or you are too sad to fly the rocket ship today, and see if your child can come up with realistic ways to “fix” the problem and restart the activity!
