Obstacle courses are the best. Right? Who doesn’t love one?
Have you ever thought about how easy they are to create? At the beginning of COVID-19 I was looking for any excuse to get us out of the house and moving. We have a long driveway so one day I set up an obstacle course, and we’ve been doing them ever since.
I’m lucky enough to have a garage full of random items I’ve picked up cheap at yard sales. So I started going through them.
An old sit-and-play airplane? Sure. Basketball net made of PVC pipes? Yup. Bin of chalk? I’ll draw circles we have to hop through. I even grabbed a toy car that had to be pushed and one of those water sprayers and a bucket. My daughter added our hose to the fun.
It was easy enough. We just had to shoot three baskets, jump from circle to circle about fifteen times, ride the airplane ten feet, push the toy car a bit, and then grab the sprayer and hit the flowers. See what I did there? We even finished the chore of watering the garden!
Pre-K Pages has some other great suggestions like hula hoops, pool noodles, water balloons and a few other items that we didn’t think of with our course.
We had a blast. Amelia did it twice and then wanted to know why I wasn’t doing it, so I jumped in too, getting some much-needed exercise myself. It was so much fun that we’ve created many courses since then. Amelia even started coming up with some of the obstacles.
This has a lot of positives. Kids at home aren’t in gym class, so it’s important for us to make sure they are exercising. North Shore Pediatric Therapy lists sequencing and memory, sensory input, strengthening and balance, motor planning and bilateral coordination as the major benefits of obstacle courses.
But for us, the main benefit was fun. And watering the garden…
Pod of One 