In PHQP_0024 Proprioception And School Readiness, Jeff explores proprioception, the body’s ability to sense its position and movement, and its critical role in preparing young children for school.

Watch Now: PHQP_0024 Proprioception And School Readiness

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson. Thanks for pushing play on with the show.

So, uh, I, uh, if you listen to the show, I’ve been, I’ve been, I talked about this before. I decided I was going to learn to play the guitar. That’s going to be my new scary thing.

And a little bit of an update. I’ve started developing finger calluses. You can’t see them, but I can feel the skin getting thicker on my, on my fingers because of the, uh, the pain of, of the guitar strings.

And that’s, that’s one of the amazing things about our bodies. Our bodies are adaptive. And so after a while, it’s not going to be so painful to play.

But the other big thing I’ve found is, uh, related to the topic for the day, proprioception. I am, I was amazed at how poor my proprioception is in relation to the skills you need to learn how to play the guitar because, um, well, we’ll get into proprioception in a little bit, but it’s about awareness of, of your body’s position in relation to other parts of your body in part. And I’ve got to be able to put my left index finger and my left, left middle finger, my left pinky, all in specific places.

Well, my heel is tapping. Well, my right thumb is strumming in the right direction and it’s, it’s a lot. And, and so one of the, one of the struggles for learning something like this, especially when you’re, you’re old, like I am, is it literally takes rewiring the brain to build these, these new skills that, that come naturally when we’re in kids.

And that’s why for our topic today, I wanted to get into, um, proprioception and school readiness because maybe if I would have been more proprioceptively prepared in kindergarten, I’d be a better guitar learner now. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but something we’re thinking about. So I wanted to dig into proprioception and its relation to school readiness because, you know, we talk about school readiness in the early learning field a lot, and it’s about ABCs and blocks and knowing how to write your name and, and things like that.

But a big part of it is having your body physically ready to do the job of going to school. And a lot of kids are heading off to school with bodies that are, are not ready. And part of it is the way we handle programming in early learning settings.

And part of it probably has to do with, uh, with other things like, uh, you know, how, how human children have never been more sedentary than they are right now in 2025. Um, and so really proprioception is, is a, is a big part about body awareness. And so let’s get into a little bit of that.

Um, part of it is being aware of where body parts are in relation to other body parts. Now for just walking around, your brain needs to be aware of where your left heel is and where your right toes are and where your left elbow is and where your right elbow is, and the position of your head and the position of your torso and all of this. Your body, your brain has to be aware of, of all of those things to coordinate things like walking.

For me, I’m struggling with the guitar. It’s, it’s the, the awareness of where individual fingers are in relation to other individual fingers. And this is, this is really important for a lot of things.

Like I say, everything from walking to learning to play the guitar to, you know, learning how to hold a writing utensil and writing your name or being able to sit still or being able to sit in a chair for long periods of time. Uh, and so, or to be able to stack those blocks that apparently it’s important to be able to stack one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten blocks on top of each other. The awareness of where your body parts are in, in making that happen.

The awareness of where your body parts are in just moving around a classroom and not bumping into people and not knocking things over. All very important and all don’t get a lot of attention. Um, it’s also about spatial awareness.

Not only the awareness of where your body parts are in relation to each other, but where your body parts are in relation to the other things in the space. Uh, if you’re navigating a preschool classroom, it’s knowing where the block tower your friend is making is and knowing where the, the easel is and, and knowing that you got to step up a little bit more because you’re going from the tile floor up onto a rug. Um, this is all very complicated stuff for our bodies.

Not complicated in terms of, of not being able to do them, but complicated in there’s a lot of moving parts in making those things work. And the sensory system, the proprioceptive system needs to be well developed to be able to navigate and understand spatial awareness. And so you can also think about proprioception as, as, um, a foundational numeracy skill because spatial awareness is part of learning mathematics to some extent.

And so having a well honed proprioceptive system is going to make you more able when it comes to learning geometry, for example. Um, beyond that proprioception deals with where body parts are in relation to ship the things around you. That’s what that spatial awareness is.

And, and so if we take those two, the two big ones, where body parts are in relation to other body parts and where body parts are in relation to the things around them, that’s a, that’s a lot of work for the sense of proprioception to be doing. Um, I’m amazed this one isn’t, isn’t taught in school. We learned the five basic, uh, senses that we, we talk about in, in, you know, what do we learn them in third or fourth grade, the sense of touch, the sense of taste, the sense of hearing, sense of smell, and the sense of sight.

Um, and, and we don’t, we, we leave off, um, proprioception and the vestibular system and the interoceptive system. These are, these are important and we should pay more attention to them. Um, proprioception also weighers in an awareness of joint load.

And so that’s how much, how much pressure, how much stress is being put on different joints, the muscles in your wrist, for example, how much pressure is being put on the joints when you’re holding your pencil, but also when you’re carrying a heavy bucket of sand, the, the, the pressure put on your, on your elbows and knees as you’re, as you’re carrying something heavy, those kinds of things. And that joint load is also, is valuable information in us navigating the world around us, moving in space. And, and so it’s very important that we have that skill developed.

And then also grip force, because we were putting pressure on our, on our joints, but there’s how much pressure we use when we grip, grip something. Cause you use a different amount of pressure when you grip a pen, um, or a baby kitten or a bucket of sand. The bucket of sand, you’re going to use a much tighter grip than you’re going to use with your pen or, or a baby kitten, hopefully.

And being able to differentiate, uh, that wide spectrum of grip force is, is something you learn by doing. And so we learn to grip things gently, to handle things gently by, by handling things. And it’s not, it’s not something that happens any other way.

We don’t just wake up one morning and have, have a good understanding about our grip force. It’s something that just gets developed as we, as we navigate the world. And if you’re, you’re sitting still a lot, you’re not navigating the world.

Uh, the proprioceptive system also plays a role in balance and stability. So balance and stability are mostly a vestibular thing, which we’ll get into in a future episode, but there’s also a, they play a part there because, um, it’s that alignment and awareness where the body parts are do play a role in, in balance. Because if I’m standing on my left foot and my right arm is up in the air, it, it becomes a body awareness thing as far as my balance goes.

And so balance and stability are part of the proprioceptive system as well. And again, these systems are all wired together because the, the awareness of where our bodies are isn’t, where our bodies are in space is a vestibular thing, but there’s also a lot of vision going there. For example, our, our vestibular system is easier to build on the parts of our body we can see.

It’s easier for me, it’s, it’s easier for me to figure out where my fingers go on the guitar strings because I can, I can see them if I, if I look at them. If that had, if I had learned that behind me, it, it’d be a lot, a lot more challenging, which is why learning how to play the guitar up over my head is going to be a real challenge when I get to that. But, but boy, once I have my, my leather pants and, and groupies, it’s going to be pretty awesome.

Moving on, vestibular sensor also plays a role in emotional regulation. All that, all that sensory awareness that goes on with our body points and that joint pressure and, and, and grip pressure and, and it, it, it doesn’t sound like they’re connected, but a well-refined proprioceptive system is also going to give you a child that is more emotionally regulated. And this can be a big thing.

If you’ve got kids in your program, for example, that are really into moving and really want to be active and really, really bouncing, giving them more opportunities for proprioceptive feedback from their bodies, and we’ll get to some of those, some of those ideas in a minute, is going to lead to calmer, more, more regulated kids. Some kids are bouncy and emotionally on edge just because they’re not moving their bodies enough because that system isn’t wired up. So moving on, poor proprioception makes school challenging, as you can guess, for a lot of reasons.

If you have hard time controlling where, understanding where your body parts are and where your body parts are in relation to other stuff, you’re going to be the kid who’s bumping into things and knocking over and losing your pencil on the floor and, and not being able to sit still and maybe being emotionally unregulated. That’s going to make kindergarten a challenge for you if you’re in all those states. Sitting still becomes a challenge with a underdeveloped proprioceptive system.

Focusing becomes a challenge. And lots of, like we’ve talked about, lots of physical skills become challenging when your proprioceptive system is underdeveloped. And so we need to, in early learning programs, work a little bit more on building well-integrated proprioceptive systems.

And how do we do that? Well, we, we move more. We create more opportunities for young human children to be up and active. And this has probably come up on this podcast at least half a dozen or a dozen times so far.

Human children need to move more than they are right now in 2025. We’re too sedentary. They need to be up and they need to be running and they need to be tumbling and they need to be engaging and in all kinds of physical activity.

Active physical play is the evolutionary strategy for building the proprioceptive system. So the problem here in a lot of early learning settings is that the things kids are drawn to doing to build their proprioceptive system are often the things we’re telling them not to do. Running and climbing and rolling and spinning and rough and tumble playing and leaping and twisting and turning and using their body in all kinds of interesting and non-linear and often loud and annoying and highly energetic ways is the way the proprioceptive system gets developed.

And so we need to create spaces for children that allow those kinds of activities if we want to send them off to school with well-developed proprioceptive systems. A piece of this is heavy work. I don’t think we’ve done an episode on heavy work yet.

We’ll get to it. Heavy work is activity that involves pushing or pulling against the body or maybe we did. It involves pushing or pulling against the body or carrying.

And so heavy work is really an ideal way to build that proprioceptive system. Hauling heavy blocks across back and forth across the room or across the playground. Having wheelbarrows and buckets that they can haul dirt and mud around with on the playground.

That kind of stuff. But also climbing and leaping and jumping. Pushing against the body is things like pushing your leg off the ground as you’re running or off a ladder rung as you’re climbing up the slide.

So heavy work is a big piece of this if you’re interested in ways to build more proprioceptive activity. But it’s really about moving. If you can create a space where kids can move the way kids want to move, that’s pretty much all you need to do.

You don’t need to sit down and have proprioceptive lessons. You don’t need to have a proprioceptive learning plan. You do need to think about your space and you do need to think about your rules and you do need to think about your policies and procedures and adjust those if necessary to support more child-selected movement.

And like I said, that gets shut down way too much in a lot of programs. So that’s that. Moving on.

Wrapping things up for this week. Pay attention to proprioception. Yours and the proprioception of the little people around you.

I pay my attention to mine in the guitar learning I’m doing but also in the gym. My mind wandered in the gym about two weeks ago and I ended up with a twisted knee because my mind wasn’t on the positions of where my body was in space with about 300 pounds on my back. So proprioception, if you’re a kid or an adult, an important thing.

Amazon idea for this month. Somebody used the Amazon link. You’ll find it on on the description on the, not the description, the notes for this episode.

Somebody bought a bunch of these boxes, 14 by 20 inch by 4 inch corrugated boxes. I don’t know what they’re going to use them for. It’s a pack of 25 they got.

I would use them for making classroom blocks. I’d take those suckers and I’d fill them up with old newsprint or salvaged packing from Amazon boxes or saved grocery store plastic bags to make them a little bit more sturdy. Then I’d tape them shut with box tape and then I’d let the kids decorate the heck out of them.

Then I’d have a set of 25 really good sized blocks for building towers and things. That would be a really valuable way to help build proprioception in the classroom. They last a long time.

They start getting a little bit wore out. You add a little bit more tape and they keep, they’re like the energizer bunny. They keep going and going.

Use that link if you want to support the show and the website. Again, the other thing you can do if you want to support things is share it if you like it with somebody who might like it. You don’t want to share it with somebody who doesn’t care.

Next week we’re going to be talking about what we can do instead of saying no and that might tie into ways we can be more supportive of the way kids want to move in space. Dad joke of the week. Well, what do you call cheese that isn’t yours? You all know the answer to this one, right? Nacho cheese.

That’s nacho cheese. Um, well, oh, and then I want to go there. I wanted to go, I wanted to go here and say this has been the Playvolution HQ podcast.

Back next Monday with an episode. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.

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