Physical Development

Physical develop in the early years can be separated into fine motor skills and gross motor skills. While both these skills involve movement, they do have differences:

• Fine motor skills involve movement of the smaller muscle groups in your child’s hands, fingers, and wrists.
• Gross motor skills involve movement of the larger muscle groups, like the arms and legs. It’s these larger muscle groups that allow babies to sit up, turn over, crawl, and walk.

Click on our P.E. page to see how we incorporate both of these motor skills within our weekly P.E sessions:

Both types of motor skills enable children to become more independent. Fine motor skills are especially crucial, not only for the first steps in writing but because strengthening the smaller muscles in the hands allows children to perform self-care tasks without assistance. This includes:

• brushing their teeth
• eating
• writing
• getting dressed

Crawl Climb Collect

The ‘crawl climb collect’ learning theme gives children in EYFS an opportunity to develop key fundamental movement skills. Through crawling and climbing it will help children hone spatial and directional awareness, and boost physical skills such as core stability, balance and hand and foot coordination. The Learning Theme is delivered through a carousel of activities each week based around a theme of ‘In the Jungle’.

Vocabulary

crawl feet hands climb together choose collect search find

Search Steal Share

The ‘search steal share’ unit looks to use a range of modified activities and equipment to support the development of fundamental movement skills. Based on an Under the Sea theme, the children will have the opportunity to develop their movement to find, collect and share objects within stage appropriate physical activities.

Vocabulary

 find seek hunt capture dodge avoid collaborate cooperate rescue