In episode PHQP_0027 Coordination, Jeff discusses coordination. Spoiler Alert–kids need to play more.

Watch Now: PHQP_0027 Coordination

Welcome to the Playvolution HQ podcast. I’m Jeff Johnson, thanks for pushing play. On with the show.

So, I talk more about coordination. Again, I’m trying to teach myself to play the guitar and I’m an old guy and I thought I was fairly coordinated. But when it comes to putting my fingers in the right place at the right time and making sure the left fingers are in the right place while the right fingers are in the right place while my heel is keeping beat, it’s very, very complicated.

And it’s very, very frustrating. And I’m loving every moment of it. And it got me to thinking about children and coordination because over the last couple years, I’ve been talking to caregivers, you know, about play and all the other stuff we talk about in this show.

And one thing that continues to come up is a lot of long-time caregivers, people who’ve been in the field for 15, 25, 35 years are reporting frustration with how much less coordinated the children are than they used to be. Somebody in Australia referred to it as kids that got floppy hands nowadays. And I think that’s a thing.

And, you know, I think it comes from the sedentariness and the screen time and a lot of that. And a lot of the things we cover on the show would address it. But I just wanna spend a little bit of time talking again about coordination.

So that’s our topic, coordination. So coordination is the ability to execute smooth, controlled movements. And it has a lot to do with proprioception, which we talked about in a previous episode.

But coordination also has to do with the visual processes and muscle memory. And there’s a lot more going on than just proprioception there. And one of the ways we can, yeah, we’re realizing other sensory systems too.

I forgot this slide was there. Vision is there, touch is there, the vestibular system is there. All of this stuff is working together.

And for all of those things to work together, that’s vestibular, the sensory system, that’s four of the eight sensory systems at least working together all at once, is they need a lot of practice. And that’s what I’m experiencing with my learning guitar is that I’ve made improvements. But especially because I’m an old guy, I’ve got this old brain that doesn’t make new neural connections nearly as fast as if I was six months old.

It’s taking a long time. So I can see those slow progressions, but what it takes is repetition over and over and over and over again. And that’s what kids need when they’re building their coordination and these sensory systems.

So our coordination develops from the core out, from our center, and then the big muscles, and then finally out to our fingertips. And so one of the problems, and I’ve talked about this before, one of the problems, one of the roadblocks to this in a lot of early learning settings is kids aren’t engaging in enough big body activity. And if we want them to be able to sit still and keep their hands to themselves and manage a writing utensil, when they get to school, they need to be doing a lot more moving in their early learning settings than they’re doing nowadays.

They need to be a lot less crisscross applesauce and a lot more rough and tumble play and superhero play and running and climbing and leaping and rolling, spinning, and all that fun stuff. So core outward, if you want to get fancy with it, it’s from the proximal to the distal, from the core outward. If you want to impress parents or your coworkers, you can talk about proximal to distal when it comes to coordination development.

And this naturally develops, again, via play and exploration. Kids are wired to develop their coordination by doing the things that they’re naturally inclined to do. Kind of, because now when kids are growing up in sedentary lifestyles, you might have young children who aren’t inclined to run and jump and spin and flop and leap and rough and tumble and all of this because they’ve always been told no to those kinds of things.

And so those instincts are kind of tamped down. And so for some of these kids, as adults, we really need to encourage this active engagement with the world that some kids may be missing out on because they’ve never seen it as an option. Again, this comes to those big blocks, I got blurry, big blocks of uninterrupted time for self-directed play and exploration.

Pretty much everything in early learning comes back to that one sentence, that one concept, big blocks of uninterrupted time for self-directed play and exploration. And if we can give those to kids, the kids are gonna be more coordinated and maybe they’ll be better at learning to play the guitar when they get older. Early learning settings often slow the development of coordination because of the things we’ve talked about.

And so we can talk about we’re trying to make kids school-ready, but what we’re doing instead is actively preventing it. And that needs to be taken into consideration. Anything we can do to get kids moving more is going to benefit them.

Anything we’re doing to prohibit and restrict and prevent their active movement and engagement with the world is a hindrance to their school readiness and their life readiness. We’re limiting natural human movement patterns. And that’s what rough and tumble play is.

That’s what kids climbing is. Those are natural human movement patterns. And the way we build coordination and wire all of those sensory systems that are related to sense of touch, the proprioceptive, the vestibular, and visual primarily in this case, the more we move, the more we develop them.

And we’re also restricting access to small bits and pieces. This is another part of this because there’s that core stuff, that proximal development where we need to be doing lots of big movements. But there’s also the way we get those fine motor skills developed is by engaging with little bits and pieces.

And a lot of times programs are so worried about kids choking. And I mean, that’s something we should be concerned about. But we take it to these extremes where young children never get to touch tiny little bits and pieces, and they need to.

Because the way we learn to manipulate tiny little bits and pieces is to be exposed to them, which means that we have to have contact with them. And if we are so worried that a child is going to choke and die every time they come into contact with a tiny little bit or a tiny little piece, we are really doing them a disservice. And so our job needs to be, yes, ensure safety, but also make sure kids have access to little bits and pieces.

And that just means we need to supervise. That means we be aware of their development. And kids go through that stage where they mouth everything.

One of the ways they get beyond mouthing everything as a sensory experience is to have more opportunity to develop their sense of touch because the mouthing is a way to understand the feel and texture of things before the other tactile senses are totally weired up. So exposure helps kids move beyond that, and that’s something else we can be working on. So bits and pieces, little bits and pieces with appropriate supervision are a piece of developing coordination.

And again, more play is the answer because in early learning, more play is just about always the answer. So let’s wrap up this episode. What do we got going on? I guess the takeaway is more fiddling, more little bits and pieces to crumble around with.

I see kids at the beach. I saw Tasha a couple of weeks ago. She was almost to the point where she’s trying to pick up individual pieces of sand.

That’s how interested she was in this. And of course, that wasn’t working. She was getting bigger bits.

But kids, they’re wired to fiddle. They’re wired to touch. They’re wired to engage.

And instead of preventing it, we need to support it as active and appropriate human movement patterns, natural human movement patterns. So fiddle more. Amazon Idea for this month, it’s these things.

Somebody used the Amazon link. It’s in the show notes and it supports the Playvolution HQ site and this podcast to buy a pack of these little things, little clips and they’re lanyard making kits, but there’s so much. If you’ve got a tinkering space and you’re looking at more fiddling opportunities for kids, there’s all kinds of fun things kids could create with this stuff and a little bit of string and a little bit of tape and a little bit of glue and a little bit of time and space and opportunity.

So something to check out and you can use that Amazon link if you wanna support the show. It’s much appreciated. Another thing you can do is you can share the stuff you like.

You might not like everything, but you might stumble across something that you find valuable either in this podcast or on the Playvolution HQ site and pass it along to somebody who might enjoy it. I’d appreciate that. Next week, we’re gonna be talking about interoception and score readiness.

Interoception, the sense that covers kind of what we’re feeling inside. It’s kind of one of my favorites and we don’t talk about it much in early learning and we should. Dad joke of the week? Well, here it is.

Why did the tomato turn red? Because it saw the salad dressing. That’s an old buddy goodie. Saw the salad dressing.

This has been the Playvolution HQ podcast. Back soon with another episode. Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.

Contribute content to Playvolution HQ
Brought to you by Explorations Early Learning