Physical Activity!
St Luke’s Preschool has a wide range of opportunities for children to engage in and explore physical activity. Due to our flexible indoor/outdoor program, children enjoy a wide variety of sports and gross motor activities to support their physical development.
The children play a big role in deciding what sports and activities we play and they love to help the teachers set up an area for their desired activity. This helps develop the children’s problem solving skills, cooperation, creativity and turn taking alongside their physical development. For example, the children may lead the set up of; obstacle courses, poison ball arenas, basketball hoops, soccer goals and many other activities.
St Luke’s has built a great partnership with Dapto Anglican Church and we often enjoy running sports and active games in the church’s auditorium or hall. These areas give us more room to run around and a space to develop each child’s physical skills. The children have been enjoying learning more about soccer and we have not only been practising skills relating to this sport but also team building, turn-taking and cooperation.
The ‘Munch and Move’ program helps us as educators create a program, which encourages the children to be healthy and active every day. It provides us with some great teaching resources and ideas to explore ‘Fundamental Movement Skills’. Fundamental Movement Skills (FMS) are gross motor skills that form the building blocks for more complex movements required in our day-to-day lives. These are taught skills and are incorporated into our program for children to explore and develop them. These FMS include: running, jumping, hopping, throwing, catching, skipping, kicking and hitting a ball. The ‘Move’ aspect of this program supports us in coming up with creative and active ideas alongside the families and children.
Play based learning is vital in ensuring children are learning and developing at their highest rate, it ensures children are having fun and learning at the same time. The children enjoy many gross motor activities and games including; riding bikes, poison ball, obstacle courses, swings, dancing, yoga and many more.
The children and staff at St Luke’s love exploring physical activity in all aspects of our service including planned or spontaneous, during transitions, in group times, indoors or outdoors and whenever we get the chance!