The A, B, Cs of physical activity, play and motor learning

A substantial amount of international research has documented children’s need for explorative, experiential and challenging physical play. Through versatile and all-round varieties of play forms and play environments children will develop basic movement skills and learn how to master their body in different and challenging situations. Children’s play is motivated through curiosity and fantasy of exploring the environment and this allows them to master their own bodies and learn to move in a variety of different ways. This symposium will consider how the abilities of: agility, balance and coordination (‘the A,B,Cs’) are stimulated and developed through different and open-ended affordances of play within four different European countries. The purpose of this is to share how the same early movement abilities (A,B,Cs), are developed according to context, culture and environment. The four countries have been chosen as their natural or adapted environments are varied, but they are all used to enhance and help the children to explore, engage in movement that develop their A,B,Cs. Different kind of A,B,C’s will be demonstrated: Finland through focusing on the use of snow and ice. Belgium through focusing on the use of water and aquatic activities, using the specific CEReKi approach. Norway through focusing on the use of the woods and forest environments and England through the use of beach, sand and indoor environments. The use of tools and equipment to help support the children’s development will be examined as well as the role of the teacher to help aid the early movement skills within each different natural or adapted environment. Photography and illustrations will demonstrate how the A,B,C’s are developed differently within each country. Paper one - Finnish perspective The purpose of this presentation is to concretize affordances of Finnish nature during winter – ice and snow. Ice is fascinating slippery surface. It challenge children’s balance and agility constantly, when they are moving or playing on the ice. Children need to activate all their neuro-muscular systems to coordinate their body limbs to keep their balance. Controlling their bodies in different postures while standing or moving helps motivate their play. Therefore, moving on the ice can be seen as playing with own body and trying to keep the balance. Beautiful white snow is free mattress for children: children are attracted to jump, run, throw, dive, cave, lay, roll, spin and use their creativity and desire to make whatever they imagine to try. These physical activities are excellent stimulation for the movement. Moving in the snow slows down children’s movements and they need to use more strength than without snow. Nordic children are lucky to have attractive winter affordances, ice and snow to tempt them physically active play. Challenging surfaces and materials demand concentration, which is prerequisite for development of physical abilities and motor coordination. The seasonal variation with changing affordances may be one reason causing good motor competence of Nordic children. Paper two - Belgium's perspective The aquatic environment is generally for children a source of pleasure and fulfilment. However, water presents physical characteristics for which the humans are not fundamentally constituted. The ability to move in the water is governed by different rules that the child must appropriates in a progressive way. For example the child has to move from the vertical position to the horizontal position in water. Propulsion uses more the upper limbs than the lower limbs. Water resistance changes the speed of segmental movements and breath must be controlled. The aquatic environment should be discovered in a suitable, progressive and fun way. This is what is proposed with the CEReKi original water familiarization method developed in Belgium. The purpose of this presentation is to illustrate how an original arrangement can stimulate the agility, balance and coordination (ABC’s) of the child in the water through active play. Specially adapted equipment is introduced into the pool to provide a stimulating environment, allowing children to evolve according to their desire and level. This presentation will show how a synthetic fibre net, bars, floats, a metal cage or slides can be used to develop children's aquatic ABC’s in an adapted and affording environment. Paper three - Norwegian perspective Children learn movements and gain bodily experiences by exploring different environments. Through bodily experiences, children explore details and quality of movements such as balance, coordination, speed, agility, force and endurance Children develop perceptual-motor skills through natural spontaneous interaction with the environment. The materiality of the environment affords challenges and experiences that promote motor learning and the children respond by exploring, discovering and face the challenges by mastering perceptual motor skills in context with the environment. This presentation will demonstrate how children’s physical play is stimulated and developed through different and open-ended affordances of play “How to encourage explorative and problem-solving play” “How do landscapes promote motor learning and mastering of bodily competence?” Approaches: * Children’s play and learning through experience will be demonstrated through a video of a natural play space * Open-ended affordances of landscapes will be presented Literature and case studies showing the contextual environment- child relationship in learning fundamental motor skills will be discussed. Multifunctional and challenging environments seem to have promotive effect on children’s physical and explorative play and should therefore be encouraged as a pedagogical approach in motor learning. Paper four - English perspective. Nowhere within the UK is further than 70 miles (113 kilometres) from the coast, and England is made up of 2728 miles (4,422 km) of coastline. The coastline has a variety of natural textures from flat sandy dunes to steep white cliffs such as those found at Dover. The beach and coastline offers English children an almost Jurassic exploration, as it is the place that is full of beauty, history and fossils, with many schools having weekly or daily ‘beach school’ in which the children, learn, explore and play on the beach environment. The photographs and illustrations provided in the paper will show how the abilities of agility, balance and coordination are developed through a variety of ways using the sand and beach environments. For example the fine and coarse sand are ideal for sensory touch development with children from very young age. Both the actual outdoor environments of the beach and rock pools as well as sand pits, sand boxes and water boxes within indoor settings are used to develop physical curiosity, through hiding objects that the children have to use fine motor skills to dig out, to use pincers to help develop their grasping, reaching and coordination skills

Editorial

peer reviewedIl y a un grand nombre d'aspects positifs dans l'éducation physique. Des études récentes montre que l'activité physique influence positivement le développement et le fonctionnement du cerveau, ouvrant des perspectives importantes de recherche mais aussi d'applications pratiques

Comprendre les différences sportives hommes-femmes pour une approche plus inclusive

editorial reviewedComprendre l'origine de la différence sportive et motrice entre hommes et femmes permet de mieux comprendre pourquoi le paysage sportif actuel est extrêmement genré. Une analyse de la littérature scientifique permet d’éclairer le lecteur sur les différences liées aux particularités biologiques et psychologique de chaque sexe et permet également de casser les stéréotypes qui ont souvent tendances à amplifier les différences initiales. Une approche plus inclusive, répondrait davantage aux besoins de tous. Les modèles de compétition dans le sport doivent également être questionnés afin de faire progresser les pratiques pour tous.5. Gender equalit

Pictorial scale of perceived water competence (PSPWC) testing manual

The Early Years Special Interest Group have completed a technical publication, ‘Pictorial Scale of Perceived Water Competence (PSPWC) Testing Manual’. This publication is the first to specifically focus and develop an assessment tool appropriate for young children aged 4 – 8 years old. It aims to address the following specific needs 1) to be accessible to this young age range, 2) to be suitable for children of different swimming levels, 3) cover all the aquatic fundamentals – water entry, breath control, buoyancy, balance, propulsion, immersion, water exit, gliding and vision. The idea to develop the PSPWC started during the Early Years Special Interest Group meeting at Laramie 2016 AIESEP, which then developed into a larger group of experts in order to develop and present the assessment tool. A four year process of critical analysis, preliminary face-validity, face-validity and content validity were completed in the development of each version of the PSPWC until the final testing manual was completed. Within the testing manual all aquatic skills and test items are represented through visual methodologies of drawings by a professional illustrator. In order to engage young children’s interests and to keep their attention to facilitate their understanding and to obtain more meaningful responses. The testing manual includes 3 level progressions for each situation, skill or test item, level 1 = “not able to do the skill”; level 2 = “skill in progress” and level 3 = “able to do the skill. The 3 level progression was developed as the expert group considered it more appropriate to have a process orientated scale showing a child’s developmental progression. The PSPWC can be applied for use in children (measurement of their own perceived water competence), in parents (measurements of their perception of children’s water competence) and/or in teachers (measurement of their perception of pupils’ / students’ water competence. The testing manual is accessible to all through open access publication

Children’s engagement in physical education could be improved by stories and imagination.

Introduction: The development of fundamental motor skills is essential during childhood and should be a learning outcome in the physical education (PE). With the children between 3 to 6 years old it could be sometime difficult to get their attention and motivation during PE lessons. Teachers have to use a very adapted pedagogical approach in order to get all children’s engagement. Experience: The CEReKi is a research center of the University of Liège (Belgium) that has developed adapted activities where preschools children are playing and at the same time developing perceptuals and fundamental motor skills. From our field experience one of the more efficient ways to get children attention and participation is to introduce the activities with stories and imagination. Teachers from CEReKi are using fantasy in order to invite children into a funny world where everything could become possible like the "the never-never land of Peter Pan". The way of telling the story as well as the used characters (like the wolf) must be adapted to the age of the children. Critical analysis: From our experience, using stories and imagination is effective in increasing children‘s engagement during PE as it makes activities more fun and more enjoyable. Even if we don’t have any measurement on its effect, we are convinced that such approach improve children’s motor learning. However using stories and imagination with the children is neither a natural nor an easy thing for inexperienced teachers. The use of fantasy with the children should be introduces in the vocational training. Conclusions: With more than twenty years of experience, we believe that stories and imagination are powerful factors that makes physical activities funny and enjoyable for the children. Such strategy may positively enchase young people’s attitudes towards physical education and ultimately, physical activity participation

Accoutumance à l'eau : 25 ans de pratique et d'expérience avec le CEReKi

Le diaporama présente de manière synthétique l'approche de l'accoutumance à l'eau recommandée par le CEREKI ainsi que les résultats d'études montrant son efficacité

MODIFYING PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT TO BE APPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN

peer reviewedOur experience confirms that adapting physical environments is critical for providing appropriate physical activity for 3 to 8 years old children.. Moreover, the pedagogy has to favour success, discovery and a fun environment. This work illustrates what can be achieved and provides clear guidance for developing centres to support the promotion of physical activity in early childhood

An evaluation of the reliability of the pictorial scale of perceived water competence and its relationship with actual water competence

In its recent development, the Pictorial Scale of Perceived Water Competence (PSPWC) showed good face and construct validity. However, additional reliability and validity research is needed, including test-retest reliability and a demonstration of the relationship between PSPWEC test scores and actual water competence. Toward that aim, we administered the PSPWC to 124 children, aged 5–8 years. We repeated this test administration after one week for a subset of 55 children to determine its test-retest reliability, and the remaining 69 children also performed the fully aligned Actual Aquatic Skills Test (AAST) in an indoor swimming pool to provide data for our investigation of the relationship between PSPWC scores and actual water competence. We found good test-retest reliability, both at the global level (ICC = 0.81, n = 55) and at the level of individual skills (Weighted kappa coefficients from 0.58 to 0.90), with no significant differences between these two test scores. We also found a moderate positive relationship between PSPWC and AAST total scores (r = .64, n = 69), with no significant difference between total scores of actual and perceived water competencies. Children overestimated their competence in three specific skills: the back star, swimming on the front, and diving in deep water. While these results underline specific situations in which children’s higher self-perceptions of their water competence are a risk factor for their water safety, these data confirm that the PSPWC is reliable for measuring children’s perceived competencies in aquatic education and drowning prevention, and there is further support for its validity through a moderate correlation with actual water competencies

The influence of isoinertial-pneumatic ratio on force-velocity-power relationships

Introduction: Isoinertial contractions are effective to generate maximal force during the initiation of the movement whereas they do not provide an appropriate training stimulus to generate force once accelerative phase has been developed (1). Pneumatic resistance is one alternative that has been developed to overcome the aforementioned limitations associated with isoinertial contractions. This technique allow higher initial velocity and reduce the decrease of force towards the end of the concentric phase (1). There is some training interest by combining isoinertial and pneumatic loading. The aim of this study was to determine how different isoinertial-pneumatic ratio influence the force-velocity-power relationships during bench-press. Methods: Fifteen participants performed bench press at 30%, 45%, 60%, 75%, and 90% of their 1RM, with five isoinertial(I)-pneumatic(P) resistance ratio : 100%I/0%P, 75%I/25%P, 50%I/50%P, 25%I/75%P, and 0%I/100%P. Velocity, force and power were assessed using a linear transducer and mechanical parameters measured by the pneumatic ergometer. Force-, velocity- and power-time patterns were averaged over the push-off phase to build the corresponding force-velocity and power-velocity relationships for each resistance ratio. Results: The increase in pneumatic part in resistance ratio elicited higher movement velocity and lower force level from 0% to 80% of the concentric phase. The increase in isoinertial part in resistance balance resulted in higher velocity towards the end of the movement. As a consequence, the use of isoinertial resistance oriented the force-velocity relationship towards force, whereas pneumatic resistance elicited a more velocity-oriented profile. Conclusion: Pneumatic-oriented resistance could be used to develop initial velocity and force towards the end of the push-off. Isoinertial-oriented resistance should be used to develop maximal force and maximal power. Resistance modality could be modulated according to training objectives. Références : 1. Frost et al. A comparison of the kinematics, kinetics and muscle activity between pneumatic and free weight resistance. Eur J Appl Physiol. 2008;104:937-56