Has your child developed the basic movement skills?

Jun 30, 2021 | Testimonials

Movement in the earliest years helps brain development as well as future physical abilities.  Keeping up a healthy level of physical activity is very important for health and wellbeing, which is why young people (aged 5-17 years) are encouraged to keep a balance of high levels of physical activity, low levels of sedentary time (and sufficient sleep) each day.

In order to enjoy physical activities, children need to develop several fundamental movement skills.  These are: balancing, running, jumping, catching, hopping, throwing, galloping, skipping, leaping and kicking.  Having these skills means that children can coordinate their bodily movements and engage in games, sports, gymnastics, dancing and other physical recreations.  Without them, they are more likely to seek out non-physical pastimes.

Encourage your children to play games that involve these forms of movements – be alert to their ability to master each.  Amanda Morin (https://www.understood.org/articles/en/8-gross-motor-skills-activities-for-kids) suggests the following that might help:

  1. Trampolines

Using a trampoline is a great activity to improve balance.  If an outdoor trampoline is not possible, there are also mini-trampolines for supervised indoor use. Keep in mind that it’s important to follow safety rules.

  1. Hopscotch

Hopping and jumping require strong gross motor skills, balance, and coordination. Hopscotch is a simple way to practice those skills. (As a bonus, it can help practice number skills, too!) If you don’t have a paved area to draw on or a playground nearby, you can set up an indoor hopscotch grid on the floor, using tape.

  1. Martial arts classes

Mаrtіаl аrtѕ trаіnіng is a good way to help children develop strength in their arms and legs. Actions like kicking, punching, and grappling work to develop those core muscle groups. It can help kids with balance and knowing where their body is in space.

  1. Playground play

Playing on park playgrounds can be very beneficial. Swinging on a swing set can help kids develop balance. It also helps them learn how to coordinate shifting their weight and moving their legs back and forth. You may also want to encourage your child to use “unstable” playground equipment like rope ladders and wobble bridges. While they can be scary before kids get used to them, they help work trunk muscles.

  1. Balloon and bubble play

Balloons and bubbles are a unique way to build gross motor skills because you can’t predict where they’re going to go. Children can chase bubbles and try to pop as many as possible. While chasing them, they have to run, jump, zigzag, and move in ways that require sudden shifts in balance and weight. The same goes for throwing and trying to catch or kick balloons. For more structured play, you can set up a game of balloon volleyball.

  1. Tricycles, scooters, and pedal cars

Some children who struggle with gross motor skills may learn to ride a tricycle or bike later than their peers. But there are alternatives they can use to practice balance. Some tricycles come with handles so you can push while your child practices pedalling. Or you could invest in a sturdy scooter or a pedal car. They’re all stepping stones to riding a bicycle. Once your child gets the hang of it, you can even set up an obstacle course or draw a track with chalk.

  1. Dancing

Whether it’s a dance class or merely dancing around inside, dancing is good gross motor practice. It helps children develop balance, coordination, and motor sequencing skills. It also helps build children’s awareness of rhythm. For little ones, try using songs with lyrics that add movement, like “I’m a Little Teapot” or “The Hokey Pokey.”

  1. Obstacle courses

Obstacle courses get kids moving and give them a goal to accomplish. For an indoor course, use furniture, pillows, and blankets to create areas to crawl on, under, and through. Outdoors, you can use things like hula-hoops to jump in and out of, jumping jacks, belly crawling, bear walking, and other creative movements that challenge your child to balance, crawl, jump, and run.

Use these winter holidays to ensure that your children are moving well and moving enough.  School time should include plenty of opportunity to develop these skills as well.

 

 

 

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.