We can't get enough of robots this week.
Reading robot books and
playing with robot puzzles have been so much fun, but we needed something to get us moving. The cold dreary winter is keeping us inside and we needed some gross motor fun to get us up and "dancing" while we practiced following directions, our left and our right, shapes and counting.
This post may contain affiliate links for your shopping convenience. View our full disclosure policy HERE.
For my daughter's birthday she got the
Fisher Price coding caterpillar that she loves. She likes trying to get it to move to different spots based on the different order she puts the pieces in. It has been helping her review left and right and has been an absolute blast. And it gave me an idea. What if the kids were the robot caterpillar and I gave them different commands? They would be able to dance and move like a robot. At the same time they would be able to practice counting (the steps they take), directions (following my directions and moving forward, backward, left and right), and shapes (walking the path of a certain shape).
To start, I grabbed a bunch of
the thick popsicle sticks and wrote "commands" on them in black Sharpie. Some of the commands included:
-walk in a rectangle
-walk in a circle
-walk in a triangle
-walk in a square
-go forward
-go backward
-jump 3 times
-2 steps forward
-4 steps to the left
-one giant step
-turn right
-turn left
-spin in a circle
-6 tiny steps
I started pulling out one popsicle stick at a time and giving them the command. They had to follow that command with their bodies moving like a robot. I showed them how that would look and that their movements would be stiff and jerky.
It was so hard to get a picture of them because they were in constant motion from the beginning to the end.
At the end, they decided to turn it around and give me commands. They couldn't read my popsicle sticks, but started making up their own directions for me to follow as I pretended I was a robot.
If I was working on this with just my 5 year old, I probably would have given her multiple commands so that it was more like her caterpillar and so we could practice following multi step directions. So many skills to practice in one quick and easy game.
