'Teaching' movement to children

NOTE - This post was originally written for our 'weekly warble' segment in a few Facebook groups for the community local to our gym.


Welcome to the weekly warble here at Ideanthro Movement (and for those of you keeping score, yep for once I've actually lived up to the 'weekly' tagline and managed to post this exactly a week after my last post!).

In this week's warble I'm going to talk about approaches to teaching movement to children. It's quite a relevant discussion for adults as well, but today I'm going to focus on children!

At Ideanthro Movement we help adults and children alike with their fitness. In the process we teach a lot of movement. When we teach movement to adults we often teach it quite directly by showing the movement, explaining how it works and we then spend time practising and refining it. This works well for a large proportion of adults, but less well for children. Some children don't thrive with this approach, while the others that do, sometimes only thrive on it for a limited amount of time.

With children we often take another approach that we call "creating movement situations". In this approach, rather than teaching a movement directly, we create situations where the movement that we want to teach just happens to be required. A classic example is with obstacle courses. We often play a game called 'obstacle course add-on'. In this game the coach and child take turns to add an obstacle on to an obstacle course. The coach and child each then take a turn to move through the course and the process repeats to build a large course. In the process the child (and the coach for that matter!) gets a lot of movement practice, but it happens organically. It's less directed and hence not as good for refining the details on any given movement, but it's much more fun, and hence can be done for longer, increasing the overall quantity of practice.

So what's the moral of the story? 

Movement can be taught and learnt in many ways. If the detail orientated approach works for your child then by all means use it, but if it doesn't (and for many children it's not ideal) then don't despair, there is another option. Create situations that are fun and in which they can't help but move in a variety of ways. Obstacle courses are a great place to start, and the 'add-on' game described above is a great spontaneous way to create the course.

P.S. We do also use the movement situation approach with adults too, but that's another story.


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Jack Mullaly