School Journal | Log 2 | Motor Skills (Before School)
In my last log I learnt that there are a bunch of skills and concepts that children learn before they start school (1st grade). I would now like to get into each category of skills and see how this learning process can happen.
Motor skills are perhaps the most visible and therefore kind of exciting skills to see develop in children. From my previous log there seem to be 2 main types of motor skills to develop:
- Gross motor skills: These are full body movements like balancing one’s own weight, crawling, walking, climbing, running and jumping.
- Fine motor skills: These are more localised body movements which include perhaps a greater degree of precision and control. This includes activities like drawing, painting, cutting and building things like lego or sandcastles.
Other actions like picking up objects and throwing them or catching them might include both of these types of skills. I’m not super clear where it lies, but I don’t suppose this classification matters too much.
Let’s begin with a sort of generic question and answer to shape my thinking on what all I need to understand here. So, I asked Google “how do children develop motor skills” and the AI generated answer had a lot to say:
My main takeaway from this answer is that there is a somewhat predictable order in which children will pick up these motor skills. That makes sense because these key milestones seem to build on top of each other. For example, it would be tough to walk unless you can crawl and balance yourself.
My other key takeaway is that the method of learning these skills seems to be playful activities, which also makes sense to me. I would add on top of this that a lot of what children learn in this stage is through attempting to mimic adults (as I read in “How Children Learn” by John Holt).
At first glance it does seem like it’ll be pretty tough for me to replicate any of these learning activities and identify anything very interesting. Having already developed these skills and without a toddler to watch at close quarters, I will have to rely on the existing material on the internet. So, I shall try to put together a sort of timeline of when each skill is usually picked up and what sort of activities could help drive this learning.
Gross Motor Skills
There are 2 articles that proved to be particularly useful and they pretty much synced up in terms of the rough timeline for when children reach each milestone. Of course all these are rough time ranges and will vary a fair bit.
As for how to help develop gross motor skills, the article from the children’s hospital of Richmond suggests ensuring enough time for physical activity each day. This amount of time may range from 1 hour to 3 hours, depending on the age of the child. They also recommend some specific activities. These include things like creating obstacle courses, playing games that involve reaching for things, jumping, moving around and so on. These suggestions seem fairly intuitive. Most importantly they make sense to me on the following grounds:
- At this age, direct instruction isn’t likely to be useful or effective
- Any adult activities which children can attempt to mimic are likely to be effective for learning at this age
- Any sort of play (fun for children) is most likely to result in learning for children
A simple google search for “what activities help develop gross motor skills” broadly confirms this idea of play and actions to mimic as the main way to learn these skills. Unfortunately, this won’t be a very useful exercise for me to replicate myself. But for the purpose of documentation, here is an article from the napcenter on some suggested activities to help develop gross motor skills.
Fine Motor Skills
Once again, there are 2 articles which I have relied on to understand the usual timeline for when children reach each milestone. As usual these timelines are only rough guidelines.
The next question is of course how to stimulate all of this learning and development. I believe that the answer here remains much the same. One provides children with exposure and play opportunities. A lot of this fine motor skills are seen in the form of activities where children will try to mimic adults and other are seen in the form of fun and playful activities. Simply providing adequate exposure and opportunity seems to be the way to go.
On an interesting note, while trying to understand what a “raking grasp” is, I had the good fortune of stumbling upon Kavya Rath’s LinkedIn page. Among other things, she has posted a great deal of super insightful content on how some of these fine motor skills are developed in young children. I have therefore chosen to put down some of the useful snippets and links to her posts below.
The different types of grasps and the stages through which they are developed
The stages through which pencil grasp develops in children
The stages through which self-feeding is developed in children
Perhaps the most useful article of Kavya’s which will help me tie together everything that we learn before starting school (1st grade) is the Pyramid of learning — Hierarchy of skills and concepts that children must learn before being ready for school (by Williams and Shellenberger).
Here is a more detailed diagram from the windsor centre that might help me better understand this pyramid.
