Boosting preschoolers' motor skills | Integrated Learning Therapy

Educators are worried about those children who are slow in developing their motor skills. There is also a concern that too many young children are overweight for their age. It seems that these two problems can be addressed with the help of an App.

“Fundamental motor skills like hopping, running and throwing a ball are critical to physical activity,” said Amanda Staiano, Ph.D., Associate Professor at Pennington Biomedical Research Center. “But these movement skills don’t emerge naturally. They must be taught, practiced and reinforced.” In addition, physical activity is a crucial part of preventing childhood obesity,”

Almost all preschoolers are physically active at least part of the day. The problem is that preschoolers who don’t get a chance to kick or throw a ball or jump and play hopscotch don’t develop the basic skills they need to get involved in more organized sports and activities in grade school. As they get older, children drift into more sedentary behaviour, depriving them of opportunities to build strong hearts and muscles and raising their risk of obesity and other chronic illnesses.

“Unfortunately, 77 percent of preschoolers are far below average when it comes to basic motor skills,” Dr. Staiano said. “Improving those skills usually means waiting until more formalized physical education is available or attending programs that might have instructors with motor expertise, but this approach delays the onset of structured opportunities or limits the number of children who can get help.”

Apps may be the answer.

A 12-week app program boosted children’s motor skills an average of 15.5 percentage points, taking them from below average to average rating, according to a new study published in the journal Pediatrics.

The study enrolled 72 children whose ages ranged from 3 to 5 years. These children were divided into two groups. The parents of both groups were given an App to download on their phones. One group’s App provided three months of activities, lessons and games to promote children’s ‘free play’ time. The other group’s App provided a structured programme of specific motor skills – hopping, throwing, sliding, kicking, jumping and catching – for 12 minutes per day.

Children in the structured programme improved their motor skills significantly when compared to those in the free play group. In addition, three months after the end of the programme, the pre-schoolers in the structured programme showed that they maintained their higher level of motor skills. Children in the free play group saw their motor skills decline.

The significance of this study is that parents and teachers can help reinforce children’s motor skill development by attending to the types of activities the children engage in, especially in the preschool years. Children can benefit by being given an early start in developing good motor skills.

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Martin Doherty, writing for The Conversation, says that at the age of about four, children reach important milestones in brain development.

One of these is a huge improvement in understanding others’ thoughts and feelings. This is the start of empathy. Another is in spatial thinking—understanding how objects are positioned and related. This is the beginning of the ability to read maps.

Martin and his colleague, Catherine Sayer, conducted a study with 175 two to five-year-olds to explore how children are able to use scale models to figure out where something is in the real world. At about four, children are able to use a scale model of a room to work out where something is. We thought that this might result from children’s understanding of how one thing can represent something else. But we actually found that four-year-olds’ ability to use scale models came from their spatial abilities.

At the same age, children start to understand that someone’s behaviour is due to what that person believes, not necessarily what is really the case. This has interesting consequences.

If you’ve played hide-and-seek with young children, you may have noticed that they aren’t always very good at it. They love the ritual of looking in all the wrong places first, but beforehand they may tell you where they are going to hide, hide in the same place every time, or not be especially hidden.

After their fourth birthday, they get much better at hide and seek. They understand that the seeker looks in the wrong places because they don’t know where the hider is.

At about three to four children also start to tell lies. They realize they can make someone believe something that isn’t true.

Understanding symbols

Martin’s earlier research with fellow psychologist Josef Perner suggests that four-year-olds don’t just start to understand how others’ minds work. Figuring this out is part of the development of an understanding of “representation”—that symbols, like thoughts, words, or pictures, can be used to stand for something else.

Children start to think about how words relate to objects. This means, for instance, knowing that “animal” can refer to something you already have a name for, such as “rabbit”. This might help children learn the new word.

Their ability to use a understand the components of pictures also improves around this age. Very young children use a lot of trial and error to complete a jigsaw, picking up random pieces to see if they fit. By the time they are about four years old, they start to use the picture as a guide, trying to connect lines and match bits of colour, while checking the guide picture on the box lid.

Developmental experiments

Another ability children develop at around four is using scale models. A classic set of developmental experiments involved a model of a regular household room. The real room had typical furniture—sofa, table, cupboard and so on—and the model had miniature versions laid out in the same way.

Children were shown where something was hidden in the model and told to find an object hidden in “the same place” in the room. Children of around four can find the object using the identical layouts. If shown a sticker under a particular chair in the model room, for example, they can go straight to the “same” chair in the other room. This is the fundamental understanding required to read maps.

Adults see scale models and maps as representations. Maps represent a town or a country. A scale model of, say, the Eiffel Tower represents the real thing. At first, Martin suspected children’s ability to use scale models is more evidence of understanding representation at this age.

He was wrong. Instead, the researchers found that this ability is based on a development in children’s spatial abilities that also occurs at about four. This is the ability to think about spaces and where objects are within them. Spatial abilities help with maths skills, and good spatial ability is linked to an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Their experiment was simple. They compared the model room task with a test of understanding how representation works. The two abilities develop around the same age, but they found they were not related. Children who could do one task couldn’t necessarily do the other.

They also had a test of purely spatial ability. Children who passed the model room task also passed the spatial task. So it looks like the model room task relied on children‘s spatial thinking.

They don’t yet know why two important but apparently unrelated abilities arise at the same time. Perhaps it’s related to changes in the growing brain at this interesting age.

Provided by The Conversation.

Image supplied by Freepik.