Balance is easier when it grabs your attention
Time for one more blog about using movement challenge/ scenarios to elicit focus from children.
In the last blog post we told the story of how a boy in our autism program struggles to balance on one leg if you ask him to, but if the need to balance on one leg arises in the course of a movement challenge that he's already engaged in, he's reasonably successful. The conclusion was that he can in fact balance on one leg, but only if he's already doing something that caught his attention.
Today we're going to share another anecdote that makes essentially the same point, but more broadly for multiple children.
A few months ago, while coaching our Youth Program, we noticed that if we asked the children to balance on our balance beams while the beams were placed on the ground, the children could do it, but there was a good chance that instead they'd just run along the beams, stepping off regularly. In short, while they could balance on them, they most often chose not to. However, we also noticed that if we raised the beams off the ground to adult hip height (high enough to seem risky but present little actual risk) the children suddenly balanced along them successfully almost every time. The perceived risk caught their attention, and with their attention focused on balancing they could all do it consistently!
This anecdote makes exactly the same point as the last one. If we (or you) want to accurately understand a child's movement abilities we need to be sure that we've caught their attention with the task that we're asking them to perform. If we don't, we're not seeing their true movement potential.
Likewise, it also means that if we want to give children movement scenarios that will improve their movement abilities we need to make sure that those scenarios catch their attention so as to ensure that they're working close enough to their current abilities as to trigger an improvement.
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