2.1 Supporting children to get moving

Early Years Wales has developed a number of programmes designed to support movement in babies and toddlers. The activity card below is part of a wider series aimed at sharing key information with both practitioners and parents, promoting the importance of early movement in child development.

The resources are intended to encourage confident, informed support for young children’s physical growth through everyday activities and play. For more information and to access the full range of materials, visit the Early Years Wales website.

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Figure 11.1 Figure 3 Early Years Wales activity card

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An Early Years Wales activity card that has information about how to support babies’ crawling skills.

Figure 3 Early Years Wales activity card

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Figure 11.2 Figure 4 Physical activities children should be involved in

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Poster produced by the UK Chief Medical Officer showing different physical activities that young children can be involved in to reach the recommended 180 minutes of activity per day. The activities are playground, jump, climb, messy play, throw/catch, skip, object play, dance, games, tummy time, swim, scoot, and walk.

Figure 4 Physical activities children should be involved in

The baby room plays a very important role in introducing and supporting the development of lots of different movement opportunities. This can ultimately lead to competence in physical skills as well as the confidence and motivation to engage in physical activity long term. The development of movement skills gives children the confidence to participate in life skills, much in the same way a child learns to speak by being surrounded with language from birth, the same is true of learning to move with confidence. This is called physical literacy, and the Welsh Government’s A Curriculum for Funded Non-maintained Nursery Settings (2022) highlights this as an important part of early years practice. It doesn’t require special equipment, just knowledge of the importance of movement; a natural desire to provide the right building blocks from the start is key in ensuring children become confident, competent movers.

Babies develop control over their movements in a clear order:

• The muscles of the neck and core muscles of the trunk develop first, enabling the baby to hold up its own head and begin to roll over.
• Next, the back, shoulders and upper arms develop as the baby pushes itself up on its elbows and begins to be able to sit propped and eventually unaided.
• Once the upper arms and upper legs have developed (through pulling, pushing and kicking   movements), the baby can creep, shuffle and crawl.
• The refinement of muscles of the shoulder to wrist, and the legs from knee to ankle enable the toddler to stand and begin to move around by holding on to people, objects and furniture.
• When the muscles controlling the ankles and feet are ready, toddlers can stand unaided and eventually walk. Walking, running, standing, hopping, skipping, riding, kicking, swinging, pulling are all possible now, and toddlers and young children can perfect these skills through lots of practise.
• Fine motor skills development is complete once the child has control of their hands and fingers, and these skills are among the last to be refined. Until a child can confidently hold, release, catch, throw, play finger games, fix things and take them apart, they are not ready to write.

The muscle groups of young children can only mature successfully if each stage is built on the completion of earlier stages of development. This is gained through plenty of practise in play and activity. A missed or incomplete earlier stage will affect a later stage – a child who has not had time to develop shoulder, arm and wrist muscles will not be able to control fine movements of their fingers as easily as a child who has had plenty of unfettered time to play indoors and outside, with toys and equipment appropriate to both their age and their stage of development.