Physical activity is vital for children’s all-round healthy development. Children are now beginning to bounce back from the ill-effects of the pandemic, after months spent indoors with restricted daily movement activities, poor diets and disrupted sleep routines.
Practitioners can lay the foundations for healthy bodies and social and emotional wellbeing by offering children repeated and varied access to opportunities to develop their gross motor skills – through balance, core strength, stability, spatial awareness and co-ordination.
Dr Lala Manners of Active Matters, who was part of a team that wrote the physical development Principles into Practice section of Development Matters, says, ‘Children’s health, at this point, is critical. Regardless of the early learning goals and the curriculum, getting children to move their bodies, through whatever means they enjoy and is developmentally appropriate, should be a key aim for early years professionals over the coming months.’
MARCHING FORWARDS
Balance and proprioception were two key areas of development that some children struggled with after the Covid-19 lockdowns.
In inner-city areas, Dr Manners noticed many children huddling into corners of the playground, daunted by a vast space, after being accustomed to the confines of a small flat. They struggled to sit on a chair at the table, after months sitting on the floor in front of the TV, eating with their hands. With no stairs to climb and no space to run or crawl, children also lost a lot of their lower body strength.
Practitioners can help children develop their core muscles by encouraging them to scoot on sit-down trikes without pedals or jump off soft-play equipment.
EVERYDAY RESOURCES
Dr Manners uses everyday resources to help children build up strength and agility because this way, she says, ‘you get a much greater transference of skills between environments’.
She adds, ‘The possibilities are greater because there’s no agenda attached to everyday materials. If you present a child with a football, all they will do is kick it, whereas if you have a scrunched-up paper bag, you can do all the footballing skills with it – and it’s much harder.’
Despite this, Dr Manners commends the efforts of nurseries like Dicky Birds (see Case study) in getting children active and engaged in a wide variety of physical development activities.
Here are some tips for using everyday resources to encourage movement:
- Use a pair of tights for stretching activities and discussing length and measurement – short and long – and forces. Socks are great for encouraging ball skills – throwing, catching, kicking and dribbling – and can be used indoors safely.
- Boxes are useful for climbing in and out of and pushing around. A huge amount of proprioception goes on when discussing how many people can get inside. Ask how many children can get inside a box sitting down and standing up or lying down.
- Cushions of different sizes, shapes, weight, colours and textures are useful for pushing, pulling, stacking and plopping onto. Get children to stamp on a cushion with both feet as hard as possible. Next, balance on one leg, then the other.
- Stick a piece of masking tape horizontally and quite high on a clear wall for children to jump up and touch. Then try from a sitting position, from a lying position, and as fast as possible.
RESOURCES TO SUPPORT GROSS MOTOR SKILLS
Nurseries and Reception classes should provide equipment that develops overall strength, balance and agility, such as wheeled toys, wheelbarrows, tumbling mats, ropes, spinning cones, tunnels, tyres, structures to jump on and off, den-making materials, logs and planks, A-frame ladders, climbing walls, slides and monkey bars.
For example:
- Early Excellence’s Set of Red Crates, £84.95, helps children develop their gross motor skills, along with moving and handling abilities, as they construct towers, dens and vehicles. They can use the Stack Cart, £120, to move around heavy materials, or the Set of Pulleys, £45, to transport items.
- For balancing and co-ordination activities, try Hope Education’s 6 Pairs of Giant Animal Stilts, £39.49, or the outdoor Eyfs Scrambler Set – Large, £899.99. Babies will enjoy the Millhouse – Rainbow Crawl Unit, £265, and toddlers will enjoy climbing in the Gonge Set of 3 Play Tyres, £174.99. Hide N Slide Kinder Gym with Roof, £1,799.99, is great for any baby or toddler room. The Balance Footbridge, £164.99, is useful to practise balance and weight distribution.
- Try Cosy’s Super Twos’ Beefy Teeter Totter Course, £169.99; Loose Parts Obstacle Course, £387.99; or Obstacle Course Starter Pack, £184.99.
- For fixed structures, try Natural Balance resources like the Balancer Bar Trio, £104.99, or Stepping Stone Balancer, £72.99.
- Toddleboxes from Community Playthings encourage balance and core strength. Sets start at £148. Or try the Outlast Tunnel, £710.
CASE STUDY: Dicky Birds Nurseries
In the year running up to starting school, children at Dicky Birds, part of Grandir UK’s chain of eight nurseries in south London, take part in a play-based physical education programme covering the fundamentals of key sports such as football, tennis, rugby and athletics.
Josh Candy, early years physical education and development teacher, who runs the sessions, says, ‘This is not about providing formal sports education – children have no idea that when we’re playing a game about balancing a ball on a tennis racket that they are building up the muscles in their arms and developing their balance and co-ordination.
‘For them, it’s just fun – and they like handling new equipment, even if they just use it to poke their fingers through the strings or feel the leather on the strap at the beginning. They also enjoy trying out the uses of different balls: how a tennis ball bounces in a different way to an unpredictable rugby ball.
‘The aim of the tennis sessions, for example, are not to be able to hit a ball with a tennis racquet by the end of the six weeks but to learn some fundamental physical skills that accompany this sport, as well as becoming familiar with the equipment in preparation for primary school. They might use the racquet, for example, to push a ball along the ground at week four.
‘I do add some formal elements – I will add a net in the centre of the “court”, mapped out with cones. But children won’t necessarily register this, nor will I spend time going into too much detail, unless they ask.
‘Every session starts with a story about the sport in question. For tennis, we read A True Champion by Puneet Bhandal. After a 20-minute walk from the nursery to the local park, we sit under the shelter that I’ve already set up and I introduce Colin the Crab, my assistant.
‘Colin walks sideways and we spend the first few sessions learning side-stepping and eventually build this up to doing big side strides, as children gain confidence in their body’s ability. I’ll explain that side-stepping is used in tennis, and we’ll all move around the area side-stepping, and when I say “stop”, the children freeze. I also use Sammy the Snake for rugby, because when we run in rugby we weave through the cones like a snake.
‘I also use games that help them to develop their imaginations. They’ll work in teams, for example, to collect all the coloured tennis balls – the “crabs” – and deliver them back to their “beach”, the corresponding coloured cones.’
Mr Candy’s sessions are part of a holistic physical development programme within the nursery, which includes daily walks and woodland explorer sessions.
He says, ‘The results we’ve seen speak volumes. We have a child with severe autism who initially struggled to get to the park, but now he engages in the activities. And primary schools tell us that our children are leaps and bounds ahead of other children in terms of their physical skills.’