Introduce
During early years, children are naturally curious and eager to explore the world around them. Providing a safe, stimulating environment with opportunities for active play, movement, and hands-on learning, will nurture physical development. Activities like climbing, running, drawing, and manipulating objects not only help build physical strength and co-ordination but also encourage problem-solving, creativity, and independence. Encouraging children’s natural curiosity creates a strong foundation for progression, appropriate to their stage of development.
A whole-setting approach to increasing young children’s physical activity means thinking holistically about how to promote health and wellbeing for children and for staff. Everyone needs to contribute and get involved! It’s less about one-off events and more about embedding physical activity and movement into everything that is done across the setting.
Image source: www.famly.co
Creating Active Schools advocates for a whole school, behaviour change approach to physical activity in schools. You can read more about their evidence led collaboratively produced framework here.
Develop
The Education Endowment Foundation invites you to consider the following options:
- Link physical development to other approaches, for example those that target self-regulation.
- Integrate regular opportunities for play or physical development in the day.
- Integrate physical development into wider approaches. While physical activity can be delivered as a standalone activity, many of the studies integrated physical development into wider cross-curricular approaches.
- Nurture physical development through varied activities, including games, opportunities for indoor and outdoor play, puzzles, arts and crafts and the practice of small tools.
You can find out more about their research here.
Have a read of the Early Moves guide below. Their aim is to help under 5s live active and healthy lives. You will find lots more ideas of how to support and nurture physical development:
Reflect
Stop and Reflect: Here are some reflective questions to consider when thinking about how to nurture physical development in the early years:
– In what ways do you integrate children’s natural curiosity into physical activities, and how does this impact their engagement and motivation?
– How do you balance structured activities with free play to allow children to explore movement at their own pace?
– How might you move towards a whole-setting approach to nurturing physical development?