A recent little activity option from the schools:
I set out this “car mat” for our littlest kids (3-4yo) to roll cars on while waiting for their turn in the therapy gym. It was mostly set up for purposes of keeping them safely occupied while waiting, but of course there’s an element of letter recognition and a very non-threatening gross motor “tracing” activity because rolling the cars over the road also means tracing the shape that the letters are.
One of my older kids (6-7yo) saw it and got interested in adding to the little cars’ world, so then we were drawing while lying in prone on the floor — which is great for developing joints and core strength! — and imagining and drawing all sorts of elements. I don’t always draw with kids, or I don’t always draw what they’re instructing me to draw, but for this specific scenario it was the right option to get the child more engaged. (Sometimes drawing for a child can make them back off harder, as they feel they can’t live up to what you’re drawing.)
[Image descriptions: Both images show a piece of brown butcher paper taped to a large mat lying on the floor. On the paper is drawn “ABC” as bubble letters with a dotted middle line, so that the letters are “roads”. The paper has two toy cars on top of it for rolling along the roads. In the second image, there have been lots of imaginative things added to the drawing, including bridges, road signs, trees around the roads, parking lots, a building labeled “Daddy’s Work”, and a submarine. End descriptions.]
