Preliminary Findings About The Nature and Extent of The Student Challenge

How important are gross and fine motor skills in relation to our cognitive processing? 

On a personal level, I realised the importance while doing 'boot camp. As I struggled to do a new 'activity modelled by the instructor that involved swinging a kettlebell around my body, crossing over arms and swinging it back the other way. Such activities take all my cognitive capacity to master. Is it just a coincidence that I have extreme difficulty in doing such activities when my peers can do it the first time, and that I struggle with sequencing letters within a word, words within a sentence or numbers within a string of numerals like phone numbers? How are gross motor skills related to cognitive functioning? 

Anecdotal observations of my students doing physical activity

As part of our schools work with Sport Auckland we had the opportunity to see our facilitator James model a series of physical games whereby I got the opportunity to take a step back and observe the students in my class move and work together in various ways.

There were two simple activities:

1. moving in different ways inside a space then getting into groups of a given number.

2. throwing bean bags to hit a cone in a relay-style activity.

These activities proved challenging for many of my students. Not surprisingly the students that found these activities challenging correlated with those students that were finding learning in the classroom difficult. 

I observed some students found gross motor skills such as marching, skipping, jumping with both feet, and throwing extremely difficult, for others it was working with others and problem-solving, and for two students it was joining in at all and they completely shut down and refused to participate. From the outside, it kind of looked like chaos. 

I hadn't anticipated these 'fun' activities would be such a challenge for my students and 'the wheels falling off' made me realise that I had been avoiding such activities, due to the 'difficulties it caused'. In my teacher management role of controlling the learning environment, I was doing my students an injustice by sheltering them and withholding vital opportunities to learn from doing. The limited PE opportunities I had been giving my students had not made me realise the skills my students needed in their development and how this correlated to their learning. 

In similar ways, my observations within the classroom show many of my students lack fine motor skills. For some using scissors to cut is extremely challenging, students are gripping crayons pencils and pens with their fists and just scribbling, people are drawn with a round body shape with sticks coming out for arms and legs with no head just dots for eyes and a line for a mouth within the body. 

Communication between students is also limited with some students using a few word utterances and not having the vocabulary to explain their understanding or how they are feeling. 

What is the significance of this in relation to the challenge of accelerating the development of the skills students need to be 'school-ready' within their first year of school?

If we are expecting our students to be 'school ready' we then need to be giving students the opportunity to develop the skills that are needed to be school-ready. How much of this am I currently doing in my day to address this need? What data can I gather to assess students developmental stages and measure progress? What can I do differently?