Sometimes children simply need to burn off some energy through physical activity. We’ve compiled a list of ten inventive obstacle course activities for kids of all ages. Create a board games outline and form courses on the floor with painter’s tape for indoor courses, make a sliding course for newborns with plush animals and pillows, and attract tiny ones with an inflatable penguin waddle. Build an American-Ninja-style course, a mud run, or a sensory walk outside.
An obstacle course is an excellent technique to get a young child moving. These brilliant ideas are easy to implement and will keep you entertained and learning for hours. Although there are many different types of obstacle courses and methods to design them, they all have a few things in common. They employ objects and structures to “conquer,” as well as a specified course that the youngsters must follow in a specific order.
Obstacle courses for infants provide various benefits in addition to having fun and burning energy. Some of these advantages may appear obvious, while others might appear surprising. Any exercise that requires children to use major muscles in their legs, arms, and torso helps them develop gross motor abilities. This can include skills like jumping, sprinting, crawling, standing, pushing, pulling, lifting, and throwing on an obstacle course.
Gaining control of their activities is a key ability that children can practice through an agility course. Walking a “tightrope” on the ground, jumping from one location to another, and climbing a playground ladder are examples of such abilities.
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Laser Maze
Make a maze for youngsters to go over and under with painter’s tape and crepe paper. If you don’t have crepe paper, you can substitute string or twine. Change things up by traveling through the “lasers” backwards and holding races to see who can get through the maze the fastest.
Tape Shape Fun
Because kids adore tape, why not use it to create a floor game? Make a variety of forms out of tape and have kids jump, walk, or run to each goal while you shout out the shape. This game can be played in a variety of ways. “Animal Walk” can be used with orders like “Bear-crawl to the square” and “Hop like a frog to the triangle.” Try the game with numerals or letters rather than just shapes for older youngsters.
Indoor Obstacle Course
Made from household items, it could save your sanity. Your kids will desire to repeat this course, which includes crawling beneath a table through hanging streamers and walking a wrapped rug balance beam.
Water Obstacle Course
The “water” slide through into the boat that we packed with water was the obstacle course. You could put a tiny pool at the bottom of your waterslide. The slide did not enter the boat directly. The youngsters designed this section of the obstacle course. They were responsible for filling the boat with buckets, which turned out to be their best part of the exercise. A couple pitchers of water were placed at the top of the slide, and the instructions were to pour one bucket down the slope, slide down, and then leap into the boat.
Indoor Activities Galore
Combine a handful of these exercises to make your own obstacle course. Try tracing a hopscotch pattern on the floor with tape, walking with a blown-up balloon across your legs, and finishing with a baby mattress slide. Or mix it up and utilize what you have, there are numerous options.
Sidewalk Chalk
Draw the full path for your kid to follow using chalk on a big, safe cement surface, using numerals, words, images, and arrows. Use colored tape on the ground to draw lines, patterns, and arrows for even less mess.
Sensory Fun
More sensory input, such as music or sounds for signaling, a snack stand for taste-guessing, or a “feelie” bag to reach inside and guess the contents, can be included. The choices are virtually limitless, depending on your child’s interests and the resources you have on hand.
Obstacle courses can also change with the periods or weather. Climb up sand hills, crawl via snow caves, and jump into bundles of leaves.
Jumping Jacks
These are just a few indoor obstacle course concepts. Include your child’s special hobbies and include him in the brainstorming sessions. Create a station that simulates scoring a goal in soccer, for example, if your youngster plays soccer. Alternatively, if your child is a ballerina, set up a station where you must execute three plies before going on.
Don’t Ring the Bells
Suspended a hula hoop from a beam in our verandah’s roof and then tied bells to the head of the hoop, making it much more difficult by tying them to the bottom as well. If you’re indoors and don’t have an exposed beam, you may tie your hoop to the side of a chair, or if you already have a children’s tunnel, peg, tape, or tie your bells to the doorway and along the inside of your tunnel.
Animal Sound Obstacle
You should ask the child to locate all of her soft toys that made a sound; the toy itself did not need to make a sound, only the animal it symbolized. This stuffed animal treasure hunt was an excellent on-the-go sorting exercise that required the kids to examine her soft toys and determine which ones made noises and which did not. They will find and select all of the animals, and you will place them along our boat route. Then you proceed to the starting line, and I ran it once to demonstrate to the students what to do. Every time you hop over an animal, you must say its sound.
Keep in account the ages, talents, and the number of kids engaged, as well as the available area, when designing your obstacle course. When developing station concepts and layouts, you have a lot of leeway. Consider carefully implementing stairs if you have them.
You can also look around your house for ordinary items such as empty toilet paper rolls, towels, soup ladles, kitchen tongs, jump ropes, and so on. Again, this is an amazing opportunity both for you and your kid to exercise your creative muscles.
Make the endurance test easy initially and gradually increase the number of stations as they are mastered. Time the youngsters to see who can finish the course the fastest. Just be aware that it can quickly get competitive.