Motor skills exercises show benefits

The group of five- to nine-year-olds were evaluated on the effects of exercises designed to improve their posture and boost their physical development.

Ruth Marlee, behaviour support teacher for Northumberland County Council, said the initial findings also suggest that as children become more aware of balance and co-ordination, their behaviour improves.

She said, 'They seem more able to sit still and hold pens with more accuracy and a better grip.'

Ms Marlee said the Behaviour Support Service had seen a rise in referrals for children as young as four. 'It may be coincidental, but no children have been referred from these groups in the study.'

Children in the groups spend ten minutes every day doing exercises to classical music or the beat of a metronome, such as the finger exercise.

The county council has trained 75 classroom assistants and practitioners in the programme by the Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology in Chester.

The Institute's director, Sally Goddard Blythe, has also carried out research on 800 four- to nine-year olds, which found that many children have delays in their physical development.

She found that out of 339 children aged four and five, 48 per cent had immature physical skills at the age of five.

Ms Goddard Blythe questioned whether young children were ready for some of the early learning goals in the Early Years Foundation Stage, including those for reading, writing and numeracy.

She said, 'We don't take physical development into account. There's an emphasis on the fine motor and cognitive skills, without asking if children have the physical development in place for these skills. Children need free, physical movement in lots of different environments.'

She added that children, especially some boys, could have a two-year gap in their expected development at age six or seven.

In her book, What babies and children really need, Ms Goddard Blythe looks at the science of early childhood development 'from the perspective of what the child needs'. The book argues that if babies are strapped into car seats and buggies for too long it affects their development because their movement is limited.

She said, 'When children's movement is restrained, it changes their movement experience in the first year. If you limit movement, children don't develop the same "vocabulary" of movement which supports co-ordination and posture later on.'

She said babies needed 'tummy time' when awake and the opportunity to 'crawl and creep' because this helped them learn to hold their head up and develop upper body strength and integration between balance, posture and hand-eye co-ordination skills needed for reading and writing.

- Further information: 'What Babies and Children Really Need' by Sally Goddard Blythe is published by Hawthorn Press, £16.99