Learning & Development: Movement sessions: Part 6 - Wave energy

BEFORE GETTING STARTED

Look again at Part 1 (Nursery World, 26 June, p16) to remind yourself about all you need to consider before, during and after the session.

PART 1: warming up

Ask the children to pretend they have a long piece of string in their hand and to trail it behind them, looking around every so often to see it. Then ask them to imagine that the string is now longer, so making them aware of others around them and not tripping anyone up. Finally, ask the children to waggle the string about, behind, in front, to the side.

PART 2: The main teaching session

- Ensure you know what you want to teach and how it links to the last lesson - for example, to enable children to control objects as they are moving, or to practise the skill of making two or more movements at the same time.

- Having practised without objects, now ask the children to collect a cheerleader baton from three or four baskets dotted about the room. (You can make a baton from rolled-up newspaper, secured and then cut halfway down in strips and pulled out.)

- Ask the children to walk waving the baton above their heads, being careful not to hit anyone else. Ask the children to run, skip and hop doing the same thing, and then while moving backwards, swaying the baton back and forth in front (do reiterate safety and the need to check behind them and move slowly). Children can be asked to skip high while waving the baton, to hop carefully, to walk quickly, to run in a zig-zag motion. Then ask them to repeat the movements holding a baton in each hand. If you want to add some music - either piano playing or taped music - this would be fine.

In later sessions you can move on to using bean bags or small balls and practising skills of throwing, catching, on their own and with a partner.

A slightly different take is to use resources such as tables covered in blankets, in which children can hide and appear as you narrate a story - for example, about a group of rabbits living alongside a farmer and, say, stealing food from the farmer's fields. Children can be the rabbits and have to disappear quickly into their burrows (under the tables) when the farmer comes along. In this way children are still having to manoeuvre about the resource.

PART 3: Warm down

- As this is complicated work, children will tire easily, so once they have returned the resource to the basket, let them move more freely, finding their own ways to move across the room and then stopping them and asking them to find another person to show their movement. This will take organising!

- Finish with the children lying on the floor, and tell them a story about a balloon on a string which a child loses up into the sky. Ask the children to watch the balloon as it drifts off higher and higher.

Helen Bilton is the author of several books on outdoor play for the early years and PGCE programme director at the University of Reading.