Here's a favorite quote of mine:
“Movement is a universal, full-time, personal, childhood occupation, and its importance in children’s early learning experiences cannot be overemphasized…Children develop movement in space to understand position, size, distance, and shape. Continuous activity…is essential for an optimal rather than a marginal level of motor performance.”
Moving and Learning for the Young Child by William J. Stinson, Ed.
I just love that! And I see it all the time with the children I work with. Did you know that we develop a specific body movement for every sound of our language while we were listening to our mothers as we were in utero? Researchers have videoed babies doing a beautifully choreographed movement sequenced according to the words first heard moments after they were born....they repeated and repeated the words and those babies repeated and repeated their movements! We as adults still hold those electrical impulses in our muscles every time we hear words...though we don't execute the movement anymore.
We must move to learn. As adults we must at least move our eyes! But children depend on full body involvement: Kinesthetic experience.
A few years ago I attended a workshop in Kalamazoo for school educators. Carol Kranowitz was the keynote speaker. She has written The Out of Sync Child and The Out of Sync Child Has Fun. Her career began as a kindergarden teacher. When her students moved on to the 1st grade their teachers were amazed at their dexterity with markers, scissors, etc. They asked for her secret....NO big secret, she said, we just get the children outside moving everyday, rain or shine. The key is that children need opportunity to learn control over their core muscles (their torso) before they can begin to work on arms and legs....and then they need to learn control of their arms and legs before beginning to manipulate the finer muscles of the fingers.
A baby first learns to roll over (core muscles) then crawl (arms and legs) then comes the pincer grasp of picking up Cheerios....(fine motor movement). But that doesn't mean they are done! That's just a glimpse of the progression. And also an clue that one feathers into the next. It is still important for a 3 year old to roll down hills or.... in Kindermusik! Try squirming like a worm! What good hard WORK!!! Still important for children of this age to be crawling! (We were so glad to have them out of that stage, weren't we!) If your child is still akward with the scissors and markers, go crawl and roll and squirm!
This illustrates learning to control movement but what about moving to learn? What about the woman who went back to school and took complicated chemistry classes, aceing them without taking notes? She was knitting!
And what about Vincent in my Kindermusik Young Child class years ago who used to spend most of the time upside down spinning around? His mom was struggling during family time when it sure looked as if he was nowhere near "Paying attention"! Yet when I asked who was the composer we had talked about Vince pipes up with no hesitation "Bach". No matter the question this guy KNEW it. I did not have it in my heart to ask him to sit still!!!
Movement is a universal, full time occupation. Let them dance. And dance we do in Kindermusik!
Love,
Yvette
