Gross Motor Skills

Motor skills are basically actions that require the use of skeletal muscles.  At one end of the continuum, we have fine motor skills which require smaller, finer muscles to execute movements with precision.  At the other end of the continuum, we have gross motor skills which relate to large groups of muscles working together to perform a movement.  This can be seemingly basic movements like walking, running and jumping, or more complex movements like performing a layup in basketball or swimming breaststroke.  Babies progress through from what we would consider very basic skills such as rolling over through to sitting, crawling, standing, walking and then running.

Each child develops at their own pace and I personally don’t believe in pushing the child to get to the next stage.  My daughter started walking using a walker when she was 10 months old but then decided  that she was going to “walk” on her knees and did that for a further 4 months.  However when she did finally start walking, she had developed a really good sense of balance and was really confident and hardly ever took a tumble.  She was given the time to work out how to balance and that worked really well for her.  My son on the other hand, has just started to explore walking at 12 months and is very cautious and feels he needs to hold on to someone or something to be confident. Each child is different and will walk when they are ready.  Resist the urge to push them.

Another reason not to push them from one stage to the next is that each stage is developmentally important.  For example, the longer they crawl for, the more they are developing the strength in their hands, arms, shoulders and trunk.  They are developing bilateral co-ordination, which will help support them with more complex gross motor skills in the future.  This is not to say that ‘bum shufflers’ won’t develop these skills, but crawlers are getting more practice at it.

The development of gross motor skills are obviously very dependent on readiness and prior skills.  Some children will find some complex skills easy to execute, where as others will not find them as simple.  A lot depends on what their previous ability is.  Listed below are some gross motor skill activities that you need to expose your children.  I have purposefully not put an age on these, as it can be dependent on each individual child.  There is usually a progression though, like the old saying ‘you need to walk before you can run’. You usually have to jump before you can hop and hop before you can skip.

Fundamental Movement Skills  

Some of these skills are called ‘Fundamental Movement Skills‘ (FMS) and you can find activities to help develop these specific skills in the Fundamental Movement section.

• Walking (FMS)
• Running (FMS)
• Jumping (FMS)
• Hopping (FMS)
• Skipping (FMS)
• Dodging (FMS)
• Climbing
• Crawling
• Balancing – static (FMS)
• Balancing – dynamic (FMS)
• Rotation (FMS)