DIY PE - How to develop Physical Literacy at home
A Perfect Opportunity
We may not realise it, but this period of isolation could be the perfect time to improve the physical education our children receive.
Sport has been cancelled and we have been disconnected from our normal routines. The reversibility principle dictates that in the absence of physical exercise our physical fitness will decline. It may feel like we have lost purpose with no foreseeable sporting events to train for.
I say let go of that purpose. Let us let go of our collective obsession with training for sport and the emphasis on developing fitness for fitness' sake.
If we can do this, we make time and space for something better. We make room for something that should have come before sport and fitness all along. That is, developing confidence and competence in wide variety of movement skills. By focusing on this, we will best equip the children of today to manage and develop their relationship with exercise in a more sustainable and autonomous manner, forever.
Finally, we have a small, but uninterrupted chance to develop our kids physical literacy!
The aim of this article is to provide a simple overview of physical literacy and some ideas on how to get started on developing it at home.
Perceptual Motor Skills
At the very foundation of our physical abilities are how we interpret and perceive the world around us - our sensory awareness. This is a multifaceted construct and includes 9 separate but inter-related types of awareness:
Visual - Focus, tracking and peripheral vision
Auditory - Picking up and appropriately responding to sound
Temporal - Rhythm and timing
Directional - Differentiation between direction and movement in all planes of motion
Body - Awareness of how the different parts of body move
Tactile - Identification and response to different textures/shapes/movement
Proprioceptive - Internal understanding and control of where our body is in space and time
Spatial - Understanding of movement in relation to environment and obstacles
Vestibular - Balance and body position in relation to gravity
Fundamental Movement Skills
Once we have an idea of the ways in which we sense and understand the world around us, we can begin to layer upon the ways in which we then interact with it - movement. There are various ways in which we can categorise these types of movement but as a broad guide we might like to consider:
Patterns - The particular ways in which the body can move without going anywhere. Think squatting, hingeing at the hip, lunging, pushing, pulling etc.
Locomotion - How we can move from one place to another. Run, skip, hop, jump, bound, crawl, roll, walk, march etc.
Manipulation - Fine and gross motor skills involving throw, catch strike or grasp (carry) with hands, feet or using an implement (bat/stick)
Within these two categories, we already have an almost unlimited variety of things we can do. So where do we start and how do we go about systematically developing them? It can seem overwhelming. This is where some structure and a plan come into play, not to mention keeping it simple!
Let’s think variables. Once we have settled on a task or a form of movement not only the type of movement can be categorised, but the way in which we move can be classified.
Movement Variables
Space - Where the movement occurs in space: High, low, straight, curved, sideways, along a random path.
Effort - The dynamics of the movement: Strong, weak, fast, slow, medium, accelerating, decelerating, continuous, stop/start.
Relationships - Interactions with the environment (objects or people). Over, under, around, near, far, copying, opposites, following.
These are not exhaustive but give you an idea of how you can start to manipulate different variables to create imaginative and engaging tasks that have purpose and meaning.
Bringing it all together
This is but the broadest of summaries of physical literacy and some suggestions as to how we might go about developing it. There are many considerations as to how to create a meaningful and deliberate journey towards physical literacy, but I hope at least this is food for thought.
Just so you’re not left more overwhelmed than when you started reading this, I’d encourage you to give the following example a go (of course within the boundaries of reasonable safety and practicability). Remember this is supposed to fun. Let your hair down, engage and partake. You never know, you might even enjoy it yourself!
Choose a movement pattern - Squat
Choose 3 types of locomotion - Hop, jump, crawl.
Choose a path - Any point from A to B in your house/garden. This can be altered as you progress or regress the complexity as appropriate.
Spend some time just introducing these movement patterns and types of locomotion in any free space. Get the kids to try them separately and see what they look like. Don’t over-coach or correct. As they start to get used to doing them separately, start to bring them together.
Crawl to hop.
Hop, crawl, jump.
Jump, crawl, jump, hop.
Ask them to create their own or build to longer combinations. Treat them like levels in a game. Maybe add in their own sound effects too. You can also play around with temporal queues as part of this warm up. Start slow, medium, fast. Try super-slow mo. Try turbo boost fast-forward.
Now you can start to introduce the next dimension of the path and here is where your options really open out. Here are a few examples:
Crawl from A to B, perform 1 slow, 2 fast and 1 medium squat, hop back from B to A.
Hop from A to B, hop from B to A backwards.
Jump as quietly as you can from A to B, perform a squat to the north, south, east and west, crawl back, sideways.
Jump from A to B with a squat in between each jump, hop back, changing feet to the cue of a hand clap.
Perform the course yourself in any way you like using those movements, then get them to copy you.
Decide together on something similar to the above, see if you can do it perfectly synchronised.
Add in obstacles.
Create a time challenge.
Get them to do it while keeping a balloon in the air.
The options are limitless, but hopefully you can see you are developing a broad range of perceptual motor skills and fundamental movement skills, while it should look and feel like play. Kids are great at letting you know when they’re getting bored. When they do, change it up. Keep it positive and meet them where they’re at! Break these types of sessions up into small chunks across the day.