N.O. COURSE (Neurodevelopmental Obstacle Course)

 

Put the physical exercises together in a “course” of things to do with specific distances, time, or repetitions to accomplish the activities in a Physical Education

type of format.  These activities work on many of the developmental levels and can become boring or tiresome if done in isolation.  Any way you can string these activities together into a creative “course” to make them more “fun” for your children will be helpful.

 

q  CRAWL (Army crawl, with tummy on floor)  5 minutes

q  CREEP  (Up on hands and knees)   5 minutes

q  CROSS SKIP  (Slapping opposite knee with hand) 5 minutes

                 You may have to begin this one with cross marching—slapping

                  the top of the knee that comes up with the opposite hand.

                  With light wrist and ankle weights.

q  CROSS SKIP BACKWARD (Slapping opposite knee with hand) 2 minutes

      You may have to begin this one with cross marching—slapping the top of the

                  knee that comes up with the opposite hand.  With light wrist and ankle weights.

q  TIRE SPIN—sitting in tire swing, spin 3 times one way, then, 3 times in the

      other direction for a total time of 2 minutes.

q  FORWARD ROLL (Somersault—use caution with neck) 2 minutes

q  LOG ROLL (Sideways rolls both ways)  2 minutes

                  Hands may be at sides or up overhead.

q  BRACHIATION (Monkey Bars-hands alternating) 2 minutes

q  SPRINTS (4 x 50 feet with light wrist and ankle weights)

                 This is running as fast as possible.

q  FAST WALK/JOG with light wrist and ankle weights 30 minutes.        

q  JUMPING JACKS 2 minutes

An example might be like this:

            Stretching exercises for 2 minutes

            Cross-Skip from point A to point B,

            Climb into the tire swing and spin 3 times in each direction, repeatedly for 1 minute.

            Drop and crawl through (pretend) tunnel (mark off length)

            Sprint to the other side of the yard (50 feet)

            3 forward rolls

            Creep to the garage (measure off a length to be done in ___seconds)

            Log roll down the hill

            Do brachiation and go back to skip and repeat cycle until time is up.

Then proceed to fast walk/jog—try to use last 5 minutes to walk and cool down.

or do some more stretching to relax muscles.

 

For the young guy into army stuff—it can become an army course.  Parents can use actual strings or bars so Johnny can pretend he’s going under barbed wire.  Creeping involves avoiding “land mines” so it’s not just a boring straight-line creep.  Log rolls help them get under fences.

Sprints across open fields, etc.

 

For the young guys and gals, a stopwatch is a great gift.  They can push themselves to beat “yesterday’s” distance or timing on the jogging or running.  50’x4 is great, but if they can do 50’x6 in the same time with good cross-pattern, super great!

 

Some of our young’uns love animals.  Therefore, every day they must be a new animal (of course it must be 4-legged).  Creeping is accompanied by animal sounds, and the animal’s “feed” is scattered about the “field.”  He must creep to each feed station in order, collect the food, and go on to the next station, which helps to break up the monotony of creep-creep-creep every day.

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