WHAT IS YOUR CHILD DOING IN ANTS?
Today is… psychomotor skills
We often hear how important it is to work psychomotor skills in small children, but often we do not know why. At Hormiguitas, we are totally committed to optimizing the development process of your children. For this reason, the area of psychomotor skills is an important part of our daily programming.
But let’s start at the beginning: what do we mean by psychomotor skills?
Psychomotricity is the Psychology of Movement. Our body is connected to our mind and emotions. When an action is performed, it is accompanied by a thought and an emotion.
Psychomotricity allows the integral development of the person, because it approaches the child as a whole, taking into account its affective, social, intellectual and motor aspects. It is a basic discipline for all learning and among its benefits we can highlight:
ü Facilitates the acquisition of the body scheme and the control of the own body.
ü Helps affirm their laterality, balance, coordination, location in time and space.
ü Stimulates the perception and discrimination of the qualities of objects.
ü Introduces spatial notions such as up-down, side-to-side, front-to-back, etc. from their own body and reinforces basic theoretical notions such as color, size, shape and quantity through direct experience with environmental elements.
ü As always when we encourage a routine, we facilitate learning, improve attention, concentration and memory, as well as the creativity of the child.
ü Serves as a channel, since the child can unload his/her impulsivity without feeling guilty.
ü Social relations are favored, group play is encouraged and essentially cooperative play, which is so important for the development of empathy and assertiveness.
ü Helps children to overcome their fears, since children have to face their fears and physical insecurities.
ü And we especially emphasize its capacity to favor self-concept and self-esteem, since our children feel more emotionally secure, as a consequence of knowing their own limits and capabilities.
If in addition, to carry out the sessions of psychomotor skills we complement it with the appropriate music we will optimize even more its advantages, but… we will talk about this another day.
For all these reasons, in all the classrooms of the Hormiguitas Infant School we favor the development of psychomotor skills, through a variety of activities adapted to the age of your children.
Here we inform you about how this aspect is being worked on in the two and a half to three year old classroom, with the help of their tutor Fani.
“Psychomotor activities play an important role in the classroom routine, and we focus on them specifically two hours a week (Monday and Wednesday). However, it is important to emphasize that psychomotor learning is not only worked on during these specific periods, but every day, our “little ants” learn by using their own body as a tool for this: experimenting with different materials, differentiating themselves from their peers, working on rhythm and coordination, etc.
Therefore, in our school we do not understand psychomotricity as something complementary to be included in the programming, but as one of the fundamental pillars to promote learning in a playful and meaningful way for children.
That said, we can cite some examples of the psychomotor activities that our two-year-old “little ants” have enjoyed the most:
– During the first months, the psychomotor activities have been more focused on cooperative games, since half of the class were children who came to the center for the first time, and we considered that at that time it was important to create an atmosphere of trust and belonging to the group-class, thus working on the relationships with their peers and with the educators. Therefore, we performed “parachute” type activities, pulling all of us in unison a large colorful cloth to keep it in the air and then hiding underneath or performing “trains” holding each other and moving slowly or quickly, also traditional games like “potato race” or trying to reach soap bubbles … Always trying to create a warm and trusting atmosphere so that progressively l@s niñ@s feel safe and enjoy the activities.
– Afterwards, the psychomotricity sessions acquired a more globalizing character, trying to collect the concepts that should be worked on later in the classroom, such as: out (putting balls inside a box) up and down (going up and down the slide in the garden), big and small (running up to the big cone and going around the small one), high and low (climbing on top of the boxes to be high and going down steps to be low), colors (getting inside a hoop of a certain color), numbers (counting when putting away or taking out each object), etc. In turn, we have also conducted psychomotor sessions related to different centers of interest covered during the quarter, such as the construction of our own “teepee” at carnival with dry branches when we dressed up as Indians; the care of the garden, which although it has been an important activity since the beginning of the course, we have given it a special relevance to coincide with the food unit, or the sessions related to seasonal changes, filling the classroom with dry leaves in autumn, artificial snow in winter and building a “hut” with flowers and butterflies in spring.
Throughout this third trimester we will continue to reinforce each and every one of the concepts that we work on in the classroom using psychomotor learning as a fundamental tool, so that our “little ants” experience each new learning experience first hand, enjoying every day of the proposed activities and taking advantage of the contact with nature, a crucial aspect of our methodology”.
Estefania García Padilla
