Gross Motor Skills Development with DinoBall.

My "20 Dinosaur Activities" blog post became a very popular one, getting lots of shares. I decided to add another activity to this post to replace the "Canada Wonderland" one. I realized, that not many people live in a close proximity to a place with a live-size dinosaurs on display, so to be true to the number 20, I am adding this activity.

I think the name makes it more or less self-explanatory: we play a soccer-like table game with dinosaurs. Take this as an idea, and build on it. This is what we did:

• players: 2 dinos (not shown here, as I was playing in the beginning; we switched to the one-dino later); 
• field: a table with boards (we are lucky to have this table, thanks to our ever-sharing neighbor Lyse, if you don't have one... table that is, you can play on the carpet, or on a bed, basically, on any surface with some sort of covering, so the balls would have better traction);
• net: in the beginning we just used the sides of the table, later when Santino played on his own, we used a tin can;
• ball: a plastic ball.

 

Game 1. We each tried to score a goal by kicking it with our dinosaurs. Santino actively commented and cheered with loud roaring. This was fun for a while.

Game 2. Then I stopped playing, and grabbed my camera to take a few pics. I suggested Santino and his dinosaur tried scoring in the tin can by shooting from the other side of the table.

He really enjoyed the scoring and the cheering parts. He loved that at the beginning there were 2 dinosaurs involved and that they got to "fight" to get the ball. After he got that out of the system, he could concentrate better on the calmer activity: putting the ball in the tin.