“Children aren’t born with body awareness.” Such a simple statement packs a punch once you really think about the complexity of development a baby undergoes while growing into a healthy and happy young boy or girl. Reading this book not only increased my sense of wonder about how children learn and grow, but deepened my understanding of how critical movement is to learning and the brain.
The book contains clear, attractive scientific diagrams and language to show how movement is the basis for all learning in young children. Does your daughter keep saying, “Again, Daddy! Again?” There’s a reason! And it’s all grounded in science, movement and learning.
Gill and Cheryl have created a “Kinetic Scale” that breaks down how the “Senses, Balance, Intuition, Power, Coordination and Control” are the key components to the development of language. “A Moving Child is A Learning Child” talks about how roughhousing is a form of Tai Chi for children and looking at a book upside down is the kid equivalent to an adults practice of yoga! Brilliant!
Movement is an area that often gets overlooked and ignored among the thousands of tomes on early reading and writing, yet movement is the basis for reading and writing. How refreshing it is to see exactly how the child is always doing the work of learning naturally. “A Moving Child is A Learning Child” interprets the child’s developmental movements and translates them into their correlating larger skill sets on the path to language, reading, writing and being a healthy, social child.
Cheryl and Gill take us “beyond gross and fine motor skills” and force us to take a hard look at the learning that goes on in the “whole body”. Included in the book are what to look for in high quality playgrounds and how crawling through tunnels and spinning helps the child develop later writing skills. As the adults creating the environments for children to learn in, we must be aware of what high quality learning spaces and opportunities look like for the young child and exactly how they translate to learning.
With more and more emphasis being placed on “academic achievement” for even the youngest of students and children, I cannot underscore the importance of this book enough. Policy makers, administration and the public, along with those who learn and teach alongside young children each day, need a constant reminder that the wiggles and spins and yells are all a part of the natural path to learning. Parents and caregivers can all benefit from becoming more in tune and aware of the vast and expressive non verbal world of the young child.
“A Moving Child is A Learning Child” helps us all see the child in the light of their most powerful voice, their movement! It’s a brilliant read with beautiful photographs, diagrams and layout, and it couldn’t have been written by two more knowledgeable and kind people who clearly delight in the world of children. Gill Connell and Cheryl McCarthy have created an essential resource for movement and the joy of learning. I highly recommend you get Moving Smart Now! and head right over to read this book!
-HEchternacht
