Gross motor skills
How gross motor skills help very young children develop and how to encourage these skills.
Contents on this page
Why gross motor skills are important
Gross motor skills are the skills that children develop using their whole body. You can see this from a baby’s earliest efforts to move and travel, to young children coordinating whole body movements. By using their whole bodies children become increasingly confident, agile and flexible.
All children need to be confident in their gross motor skills and movements. For some children this confidence will come in smaller steps and take longer to achieve. Be patient, giving them time and space, and encouraging words. Take expert advice for children with physical and mobility additional needs. This may increase childrens’ development of muscular strength, ability to take well intentioned, safe risks and become increasingly well-coordinated.
Gross motor skills affect wellbeing and give children opportunities to socialise in play. Confidence and coordination in gross motor skills are essential for children in developing their fine motor skills.
Video
In this video, an early years expert explains the importance of gross motor skills in the early years foundation stage framework. There are also some tips on how to support children in this area.
Transcript
Transcript
Gross motor skills are the movements children develop using their whole bodies. Adults who work with children can support spontaneous movement by creating a safe environment for them to play in and encouraging activities that will help young children become stronger, fitter, and live life with vitality.
So as practitioners, what’s your role in ensuring that children are as active as possible? I think there is a need for practitioners to explain, describe, and narrate what children are doing physically. It’s really important for us to model language that reflects a can‑do attitude, narrating their experiences and their development within their physical play. That is a key part of the practitioner’s role.
As adults, we know that by the time children are five, 90% of their brain is developed. That’s a key thing to remember. We’re not just looking at gross motor skills and supporting development through resources. We’re also shaping the attitudes children form towards physical development, which they may carry with them for the rest of their lives.
When thinking about setting up environments that are challenging, varied, and encourage lots of gross motor movement, what is the adult’s role in ensuring a balance between challenge and safety?
We use a lot of large loose parts in our outdoor environment, such as scaffolding planks, tyres, cable reels, and ropes. What is beautiful about these opportunities is that children can take risks and learn to risk‑assess for themselves whether they feel safe. As a practitioner, if I sense a child may not feel as safe as they could, I might ask, “Do you feel safe? What could you do to make yourself feel a bit safer or more steady?”
How do you support children’s sense of confidence? It’s really important as a practitioner that you feel confident in the space yourself. There is a lot of risk assessing that happens behind the scenes in children’s play and learning. You need to know that the space is safe while still offering plenty of opportunities for risk‑taking, without removing challenge entirely. When practitioners feel confident and relaxed in that environment, that confidence transfers to the children. It becomes a shared, two‑way relationship, with confidence spreading throughout the group.
Giving children opportunities to visit and revisit spaces and resources is also important. When children are taken to environments such as woodland, they may need time to become familiar with the space, understand what is there, and learn how they can use it.
Children gain confidence when they have time to revisit spaces, places, and resources. Repetition helps. Giving them time to observe and ask, “What is out there? How can I use it?” supports their confidence to try new things.
Children need to experiment with the natural push and pull of their world, exploring how their bodies relate to it and to others. Having opportunities to explore these areas allows us to influence children’s lifelong attitudes to physicality and the joy of movement. Children between one and four years old should be physically active for at least three hours per day. This supports their long‑term health outcomes, brain development, learning across the curriculum, and their sense of vitality and joy.
What the EYFS framework says
Gross motor skills provide the foundation for developing healthy bodies and social and emotional wellbeing.
Statutory framework for the early years foundation stage.
What this means in practice
Children need access to indoor and outdoor environments that help develop their gross motor skills, with you to guide and support them, every day. Outdoors is where children have the freedom to be as physical as they can be.
Walking to local green spaces can help build children’s stamina. If babies and children have to be pushed to a destination, on arrival, give them opportunities to move around on the woodland floor, the grassy area in the park or the pebbly beach.
When considering children’s gross motor skills think of crawling, walking, running, jumping, hopping, skipping, creeping and slithering, spinning, turning, twisting, pushing and pulling. Babies need to have daily ‘tummy time’ to develop their muscles for sitting and crawling.
Older children engage in weight bearing skills and develop upper arm strength, mobility, control and balance. This could be by hanging from climbing equipment or lifting and manipulating large, heavy and awkward objects.
You should notice what children are doing physically and make sure that what they can use indoors and outdoors is challenging enough. You need to know about each child’s physical development.
Children need to take safe risks. However, most children will self-regulate and not attempt movements that they are not confident with.
Consider what equipment you have in your setting that support gross motor skills such as den making materials. Try to have a variety of objects children can lift, transport and organise on their own.
Try to help children to be physically active for at least 3 hours each day.
Suggested activities
Moving house
You’ll need:
- ‘home’ toys like plates and cups
- children’s furniture that is safe to move like plastic chairs
- the furniture and resources in the home area
- cardboard boxes and bubble wrap
- sticky tape and masking tape
- clipboards and pens
- an improvised removal van
‘Moving House’ play supports the development of muscular strength, core strength, whole body coordination and the ability to carry objects safely.
Many children have moved from one home to another. Naturally, they want to roleplay this experience. Children may start ‘moving house’ themselves, which you can support. Or you may want to start the play.
Children will know where they want to move to. Prompt discussion about the type of home the children are moving from and to, for example a flat or a house? What kind of house?
Suggest that they check that they have a safe route and space to set up. They may need to discuss it with other children and adults.
Start with wrapping things up and putting them in boxes. The children will physically pick up and move the boxes and furniture, either to the new home or into the ‘removal van’. They’ll need support to ensure they do this safely, but they will want to get it right.
Have clipboards for making lists and checking that all possessions have arrived safely at the new house. These can be mark making or pictures.
How this activity links to the other areas of learning
Wrapping the smaller objects will help their fine motor skills. Making lists will support literacy. Talking about people living in different types of accommodation links with understanding the world. Roleplaying a significant life event will help them to handle their personal, social and emotional development during a real move.
Obstacle courses
You’ll need some items from this list of suggestions:
- crates
- wooden planks
- bread trays
- tunnels
- stepping stones (wood off-cuts)
- hoops
- cones
- rockers
- trampoline
- blankets
- slide
- tyres
- ladders
You can also include fixed climbing equipment, outdoor furniture, paths and natural features, such as tree stumps or fallen branches.
You may observe children finding their own obstacle course with what is already there, travelling in lines, going over, going under and going through. Children may repeat the route, challenging themselves and others.
Get them to help you build a course. They’ll try out different parts of the course as it is being built, testing that it works.
Once the obstacle course is constructed children will revisit it. Each time they will become increasingly skilful in negotiating the different spaces, pieces of equipment and the length of the course. They will also speed up and travel faster.
Some parts will feel like more of a risk than others and the children will enjoy this element of challenging themselves.
How this activity links to the other areas of learning
Children will constantly communicate, non-verbally and verbally as they negotiate the course. They’ll instruct each other, expressing their emotions, and encouraging each other (communication and language). There are opportunities for you and the children to use mathematical language, words to describe quantity, size, length, speed, as well as to make comparisons (mathematics).
Other activities
Physical activity guidelines for children under 5 years from the NHS.
Learning through landscapes has ideas for outdoors activities.
What other nurseries and childminders are doing
“Since Covid I have changed my provision so that everything is outside. It is working very well indeed. The children love it and they’re thriving in every way.”
Julie, Childminder, Ilkley West Yorkshire.
“The children spend a lot of time being adventurous outside. Not everyone has been confident with this, but now we have regular online team meetings and practitioner confidence has blossomed.”
Mandy, Naturally Learning, Truro.
“Everyone comes on our walks. One destination is a particular hill in the park. Walking up the hill is a struggle for young children to start with but over time we see them running up.”
Julie, Childminder, Ilkley West Yorkshire.
Summary
- Gross motor skills are all the skills that children develop using their whole body.
- Children’s development of gross motor skills affects their learning and development.
- Children need access to outdoor areas every day.
- Children need to take safe risks and will usually not attempt movements that they’re not confident with.
- Try to help children to be physically active for at least 3 hours each day.
Next steps
- Involve parents and carers by sharing the children’s achievements in developing gross motor skills with them.
- Observe what the children are doing and notice movements that are more advanced, such as, twisting, slithering.
- Consider how your routine and resources enable children to be physically active.
- Review your curriculum to ensure you cover the requirements in the EYFS for this area of learning.