Smart Children Play Hard Too

Parents who encourage their pre-school children to favour sport over sedentary play involving video games or mobile device games may be enhancing their cognitive development and future learning abilities.

“The extent to which a child develops literacy and language skills is related to the development of fundamental movement skills. Early motor skills development helps lay the foundation for early learning and language development,” says Mr Micheal Lim, Senior Clinical Exercise Physiologist, Sports Medicine Service, KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH), a member of the SingHealth group.

Fundamental movement skills are essential because they stimulate a child’s brain development. When children engage in movement play, they are constantly interacting with the surrounding social and physical environment. This forces their body and mind to interact, and in the process, they form neural connections, which helps develop sensory motor pathways.

Continuous sensory integration arising from movement helps provide a foundation for more complex sensory integration required for learning tasks such as reading, writing and numeracy, as well as psychomotor skills like riding a bike.

Psychomotor skills require balance and complex hand-eye coordination. Once learnt, they become automatic.

Read more on children’s active play.


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