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As in any activity you do with kids, the key is to make it fun for them. Children learn by playing. When children are at play, this is where they are most focused and where most learning occur.

The key is variation. Children have short attention spans. At 5 years old, you must vary the activity every 5-10 minutes. Be flexible. Let the children's interests inspire you to the next activity or variation. And remember to drink lots of water!

Try some of these workouts :

The Zoo Workout - Start by mimicking how animals move. Walk like an elephant, a tiger, hop like a frog, fly like a bird. Choose your own animal and then pretend you are in the jungle, interact with each other! Then take turns dong this one by one and the rest will guess what animal is being mimicked. Chase each other around. You can also do a variation of the classic Duck Duck Goose. Each child wears a name plate of an animal. The "goose" goes around and says the different animal names when then shouts "it!". You have to run around the room as the animal on your name tag.

Dance Workout Every kid from 5 to 15 enjoys a good dance, and so do adults! Have fun by simply playing some music and letting the groove move you. Then do some isolations dance only with the hips, dance only with the head, dance only with the arms, dance only with your eyes and so on. Then you can do "Stop Dance" play music and move, press stop and everyone says still like statues, and again and again!

Obstacles This entails a bit of preparation but is well worth it. You need somewhat of a bigger space, a lawn area would be good. Set up old tires, old paint pots (make sure they are well embedded on the ground), benches, sanded trips of lumber, hoops, ropes, tables, basically anything you can find in your backyard or the neighbour's backyard. Create a long winding obstacle. Kids will have to try and balance on your different obstacles. Demonstrate firstly how to go about the course jump, balance, crawl and climb.

Balls Balls are a great investment and does wonders for eye hand coordination. Buy different sized balls perhaps a can of tennis balls, a football, a big beach ball and an oval rugby ball. Play catch, kick the ball around, kick them through a course, throw them into a target, throw it as high up as you can straight up into the air and catch!

Gross motor skills are important to develop because children cannot develop fine motor skills without gross motor function. In other words, they need to run, hop, jump, skip
and climb before they will be ready to sit, listen and write.

Best of luck. And have fun!

Learn more about this author, Sunshine Ross.
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