[Music]
[Text on screen: Koringa Hihiko, active movement an activity guide for under fives. Growing Independence – One To Two Year Olds pt.1]
Voiceover:
Growing Independence (1-2 year olds) - Part 1
[Text on screen: Active movement Koringo Hihiko]
Voiceover:
Active movement – making the connection between movement and learning to develop the whole child.
Gill:
There’s a whole series of physical milestones that we see the children going through.
[Text on screen: Gill SPARC Active Movement Advisor]
Gill:
And the milestones are developmental indicators if you like of where the child developmentally is at. So the girls will have been rolling when they were little, then started to crawl, then they walk. And after walking, comes jumping. And the beginnings of jumping actually happen really, really early on, so you start seeing little people, even when they’re not walking, they’ll sit on balloons or on your knee even and bounce up and down. Any time from 18 months is when we usually find children starting to two-foot jump. That means they lift both feet off the ground, which is actually really early.
Speaker 2:
Ready, jump! Good girl, good girl.
Gill:
There’s a significant stage. It’s a stage that the children are still functioning in what we call the bilateral state of development.
Speaker 2:
Good girl.
Gill:
Which means neither side of my body is dominant.
Speaker 2:
Jump!
[Graphic: diagram of midline]
Voiceover:
The girls have got an imaginary line down their bodies called the midline, and that separates their left side from their right side. At this age their bodies are functioning as a whole, one side of the body mirrors what the other side is doing.
Gill:
It’s not till I’ve jumped and I learn to jump and I bounce up and down, that I start to cross my midline, okay. That then means I can then start to do these kinds of things, and these kinds of things where, you know, what one side of my body is doing something different from the other, okay. And it’s very significant when I go to school because I need to hold this side still while this side moves, you know, so I have to have lots of practice at doing those kinds of things.
[Music]
Gill:
The best thing to do to encourage midline is to do crawling activities. So playing games where you’re chasing the child around the house, put all your chairs together and put the blankets over the top and do crawling activities. All that kind of thing is going to help with this midline thing.
Voiceover:
And don’t think that once your child is jumping that the midline’s been conquered.
Gill:
Later on in development you might notice with your boys in the swimming pool they’re swimming nicely with a kickboard and they’re kicking away. And so you say, “Oh, we’re going to bring in the arms.” So you take away the kickboard and they start using their arms, and what happens to the feet?
[Graphic: Diagram of midline]
Speaker 2:
They stop.
Gill:
Yeah, they stop. Then you say, “Hang on a second you’ve forgotten your feet.” So, they start with their feet again and the hands stop, okay? That’s because I still haven’t sussed out completely the midline thing because the midline thing allows me to do something with one side of my body than it does with the other. So it’s much practice of doing things with both sides of the body at this stage, not trying to make them become right-handed or left-handed because there is no advantage in doing that. Just allowing them to have free reign of using both sides of their body.
That means, in the highchair, when they start using the spoon, where are you going to put the spoon on the highchair?
[Music]
Speaker 2:
I don’t know.
Gill:
In the middle.
Speaker 2:
Right.
Gill:
So that they choose.
[Music]
Gill:
And this leads me on to talking about body image and understanding my body. We do a lot of baby massage with little people so that they learn that their body starts up here and finishes down here. Now at 18 months and a little beyond that it’s still important to do that. You might notice that they’re particularly clumsy at this stage. They trip over things and bang into things because they’re growing so jolly fast, they have to adjust, they’re a different size. So they’re having to have experiences all the time to learn about their different body shape and size.
But learning about their body image also requires us touching those areas, and touching, as you massage, this is your elbow.
Speaker 2:
Where’s your ears Samantha? Where’s your ears?
Voiceover:
This develops language.
Speaker 2:
Here they are. That’s your ears.
Voiceover:
So name all the parts of the body.
Speaker 2:
Where’s mummy’s ears? Ah, there they are, good girl.
Voiceover:
Dolls are great to do this with.
Speaker 2:
What’s that?
Child:
[Baby speak]
Toes!
Speaker 2:
Toes, that’s right.
Gill:
Children know the main parts of their body. I get kids at school age just to walk heel to toe across the beam, or across a plank or something. A lot of them don’t know where their heels are and I’m wondering why they can’t walk heel to toe, you know. Oh, bingo, I know, it’s because they don’t know where their heel is.
Away you go Lucy, you go and get it.
Voiceover:
At this age it’s also a good time to start strengthening the upper body which ultimately will give them the capability to master writing with a pencil.
Gill:
Good girl, there you go.
Fine motor doesn’t happen until we’ve got our gross motor skills sorted out so those are the large body muscles activities, doing row, row, row your boat with them.
Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.
Pulling them up from a lying down position, hanging them up by their hands. Do you do that kind of thing?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, they love that.
Gill:
And if they start to pull their head back like that, that’s a sign to you to stop doing that because what we want for them to do is to actually what we call co-contract their muscles. And that means they lock their elbows and take their own weight.
[Music]
Gill:
If they drop their head back like that it usually means that I’m not using my own muscle tone to pull myself up or to hang myself, and that can be dangerous. You don’t want to pull the arms out of the sockets.
Speaker 2:
Okay.
Gill:
But doing those kinds of thing is really significant. Are there are things that I’ve talked about today that you didn’t know before about children’s development?
Speaker 2:
Yes, there were a lot of things actually that I hadn’t heard before, so it was really good to see some of the things that the girls were doing that I can understand now the reason behind the play. Yeah, it was good.
Gill:
Get them jumping, that’s really where they’re at. This is the age of jumping, exploration, finding out about their world.
[Music]
[Text on screen: Koringa Hihiko, active movement an activity guide for under fives]
