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.

Episode Video

Watch Now: PHQP_0024 Proprioception And School Readiness

Episode Notes

Proprioceptive System

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The Important Role Of Kinetic Chains In Early Learning

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Balanced And Barefoot: How Unrestricted Outdoor Play Makes for Strong, Confident, and Capable Children

The Proprioception And School Readiness Transcript

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,