Enabling Environments: Hand-eye co-ordination - Take your pick

While early years settings have made excellent progress in recognising the value of outdoors in supporting children's physical development, some tend to focus on the outdoors as a place for developing gross motor skills and for noisy and boisterous play. However, outdoors has a vital role to play in the advancement of the quieter, more precise physical skills that children will need as they become ready to take on greater responsibility for their own health and hygiene - and, of course, the challenge of school.

It is important that we don't assume that these skills will emerge 'naturally' as children mature. Some degree of 'physical education' is needed, even if we don't often hear that phrase in early years. High-quality interventions by key adults in the setting and at home can consolidate skills and extend opportunities for hand-eye co-ordination.

By 'hand-eye co-ordination', we refer to children's ability to translate an instruction from the brain - triggered by the sight of something or someone - into a corresponding physical action. At its simplest, a baby might demonstrate its mastery of hand-eye co-ordination by reaching out to touch the face of a carer, or its own toes. A more accomplished child might be able to bounce and catch a ball, turn on the hosepipe or pick up grains of sand. In the years ahead, these skills could help the child to touch type, read and play music or undertake DIY tasks.

There is clearly a 'bigger picture' where hand-eye co-ordination is concerned, but there are also immediate concerns for which an ability to match visual cues with physical actions is essential. These are:

• hygiene and care routines

• eating and drinking

• writing, drawing and painting

• walking, climbing and jumping safely and effectively

• manipulating small toys and objects, or turning the pages of books

• physical gestures to aid communication.

Early Education's EYFS companion document Development Matters outlines the approximate ages at which children are able to master physical skills such as reaching and grabbing (0-11 months), banging objects together (8-20 months), early mark making (16-26 months), climbing and pulling up strongly (22-36 months), building structures (30-50 months) and using tools (40+ months).

Hand-eye co-ordination should form part of your continuous provision and it is likely that indoors resources and routines are well established to enable you to support and observe children's development in this area. Outdoors, there are countless ways to enrich this provision, using simple, low-cost and easily accessible resources, many of which you may already have.

Activities that require children to repeat the action or that involve varying degrees of effort to complete are of particular value - for example, threading objects on to a length of bamboo with fluctuating diameters all along its length. Appropriate clothing, stored accessibly, allows children to play outdoors whatever the weather and is among the most vital of all resources in a setting. By ensuring children can attempt to dress and undress themselves (whether it is a simple sunhat or more complex waterproof dungarees), you will be supporting hand-eye co-ordination before they have even stepped outdoors.

SOME IDEAS FOR BABIES AND TODDLERS

• Stimulate babies' urge to grab by placing enticing artefacts on the grass or hanging objects on string from a washing line so that they move in the breeze or when they are touched.

• Provide sticks and hand-sized pebbles that can be bashed together to reward effort with magnificent noises. Placing these in to a basket or in a pile will encourage babies and toddlers to identify and choose which objects to pick up and use.

• Mirrors at low level along your walls will fascinate babies and toddlers - they will want to touch their own faces and those of carers.

• If you can find a source, provide large chunks of naturally occurring chalk for babies and toddlers. Fist-sized lumps of natural chalk need effort to manipulate, feel wonderfully cool and crumbly in the hand and their irregular shapes provide a far more sensory mark-making experience than shop-bought chalks.

• Use a fence or trellis for weaving. Many settings now do this, but remember to keep your box of gorgeous, shiny, glittery, long ribbons topped up so that the activity is irresistible and offered every day.

• In the sandpit, include resources that require manipulation to be effective, such as watering cans with removable sprinklers, buckets with lids, tubes and funnels, and 'small world' diggers.

SOME IDEAS FOR PRE-SCHOOLERS

• Growing vegetables is an excellent way for older children to develop strength as well as hand-eye co-ordination. Picking out tiny seeds, transplanting seedlings, weeding around plants, watering carefully and picking the produce all require patience and concentration. If you don't have a growing patch, large pots will do just as well.

• Build a collection of large sticks - at least the height of your children and of a hefty weight. Use these for den-building, laying trails, counting activities, music-making and much more. Moving and carrying heavy, unwieldy sticks is an acquired skill and helps children become more aware of the space their bodies occupy.

• Consider introducing climbing traverse wall holds, with plenty of eyeand high-level handholds to challenge children of different heights and abilities.

• A 'grab and go' water play kit containing rollers, paintbrushes, tubes and hoses, siphons, sprinkler bottles and funnels will provide multiple opportunities for developing hand-eye co-ordination - and many of these will demand co-operation with friends too. Include aprons with ties or Velcro to add to the challenge.

• Make faces on your tree trunks using clay, natural materials and found objects. Accessorising small clay faces will require more delicate, purposeful movements. Larger faces can accommodate more materials and therefore extend the effort required.

• Borrow some rabbits, guinea pigs or hens for a week. Caring for animals involves feeding them, cleaning them out, grooming them and showing affection. These tasks require careful movements and attention to detail.

• Learn a few British Sign Language or Makaton signs to describe parts of your garden (or you could make your own up) and ask children to take their parents or carers on a signing tour.

• Encourage children to build increasingly complex structures using crates, blocks, logs, real bricks and a variety of connectors such as pegs, string, flexi-wires, masking tape and bungees.

• Build a fire, whittle sticks into a point using veggie peelers and then cook cocktail sausages and marshmallows (perhaps not together) over the fire. If you don't have a fire pit, use bricks to create an edge, or build your fire in a turkey roasting tin on bricks.

More information

• Cosy Direct (01332 370152 for a catalogue) has a huge selection of simple and natural resources to encourage physical development

• Enabling Environments - Physical Development: Moving and Handling - section in Development Matters, www.foundationyears.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/ Development-Matters-FINAL-PRINT-AMENDED.pdf

• 'Helping hands' article on fine motor skills by Jan White, www.nurseryworld.co.uk/article/1134033/

• RSPCA, www.rspca.org.uk, for information about caring for pets

CASE STUDY: SLADE DAY NURSERY AND SLADE NURSERY SCHOOL

On a visit to Slade Day Nursery and Slade Nursery School, both part of Slade and Headington Children's Centre in Oxford, I was struck by the quality of play of a group of boys. Involving crates (see main photo) and inspired by a book on volcanoes, the boys collaborated to make their own volcano, discussing shape and size, experimenting with height and stability, and playing out a story in which they starred as explorers.

Slade headteacher Sue Vermes says, 'While we don't set out resources to specifically focus on hand-eye co-ordination, open-ended resources that offer multiple affordances - different shapes, sizes, weights and materials - encourage children to explore using gross and fine motor skills.

'For us, the concepts of "abundance" and "generosity" are vital, so children at Slade have plenty of time and space to practise and experiment and repeat, so that they become more confident and accurate in their movements and able to predict possible outcomes.'

Julie Mountain is director of Play Learning Life