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Do you remember the days when streets outside our homes and school playgrounds were full of (mostly) girls skipping rope? We don’t see this as often today, although it always gives me great pleasure when I do come across a few girls enjoying themselves in this age-old pastime.

I feel good when I see them because I know that they’re engaging in an activity that is just as good for their brains as it is for their growing bodies! Athletes use skipping ropes to help them get super fit. Boxers, like Muhammad Ali, have been including skipping in their daily routines for many years and others, like Venus Williams and Martial arts star Bruce Lee did it too. But with new knowledge from neuroscience, we now know that aerobic activity with added mental engagement can do wonders for helping the brain as well as the body. Aerobic exercise, raising the heartrate, produces chemicals that promote neural growth, make new connections, boost attention, focus and ability to learn efficiently. Many skipping games involve reciting rhymes, following a sequence of movement and so on, which meet the exact criteria for brain-healthy exercise.

Our children need to move so that their brains can function optimally. With today’s crowded housing, fears of allowing children to play on the street and even limited playground space at some schools, space for games is limited. This is where skipping comes in – it doesn’t need much space at all.

So why don’t families and schools begin a country-wide movement to encourage learners to skip? Make it part of the daily schedule and PT periods; arrange competitions; reward perseverance, practice and achievement so that learners realise that their school takes skipping seriously and values it as a sport. Moms and Dads can join in skipping sessions at home – it’s just as good for mature brains and bodies!

There are resources to help you with ideas about teaching skipping and then proceeding from individual to group skipping games. One that I came across on the internet is a publication from Canada, entitled Jump! The Nick guide to jumping rope. It covers the length of rope necessary for one’s height, different types of rope that are suitable and stretching exercises that are useful to do prior to beginning a skipping session. It then proceeds to explain various games from the most basic, solo skipping movements to challenges involving groups of children. Visit the websites www.nick.com and the booksellers, www.chroniclekids.com. I’m sure there are other sources available too.

So grab some lengths of rope get your learners moving!

Image supplied by Freepik.

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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.