The little things

Every lesson is a chance to work on children’s physical development. Ignore this and learning may suffer as a result, says Nancy Gedge...

I have a terrible admission to make. I can’t bear learning objectives. Oh, I’m not against children knowing what is going on, far from it; what I object to is the idea that a lesson is about one thing, and that somehow the incidentals don’t count. Having a child with Down’s Syndrome in my life has given me an interesting, deeper, more nuanced perspective on the matter.

Take maths games, for example. On the face of it, the activity might be about generating calculations, but, along the way, there are all sorts of important other bits of learning that children miss out on if I provide them with a ready-made game. When will they learn to use the scissors and glue, to colour neatly, keeping within the lines, to write instructions other people can read if yours truly does all of that for them? 

We see them all the time – kids who bump into things, fall over regularly, run in an ungainly fashion, their handwriting scrawled untidily across crumpled pages as they wriggle and fidget in their plastic chairs, and yet, in our desire to finely pinpoint what their brains must be thinking in order to fast-track their learning, we discount the physical development that children need to master in order to take in what we are trying to teach.

I’m sure the day Sam’s teacher discovered a 1kg bag of rice in his backpack instead of a packed lunch she must have thought I, his mother, had finally lost my marbles. But after realising that his sensory processing was weak, his proprioception (the way the messages to his brain are received from his joints and muscles, giving him information on where his body is, and how to control it) was poor, I decided to do something about it: give his body something it could refer to. 

For some children, these bodily messages take a little while longer to get to their brains, and there are plenty of simple things we can do in the classroom to help them (though we don’t need to rely on bags of basmati). Anything that gets those muscles working, jobs that occupational therapists class as ‘heavy work’, will do the trick – taking chairs down in the morning, cleaning the board, handing out books, putting the gym mats away. Resistive activities like these can improve children’s attention, their body awareness and, importantly for Sam and children like him, increase muscle tone and reduce defensive activities (that’s the wriggling and fiddling, the grinding of teeth, the funny humming noises that some children can’t seem to resist making in order to give themselves more sensory information) so that they can better cope with classroom life.

And it doesn’t have to be all about gross motor activities; after all, we are in the business of helping children to express themselves by writing things down. Their fingers can do with some special attention too. You could spend time and money researching pencil toppers or little things to fiddle with, or, you could go down the thrifty route and wrap a fabric plaster or a bit of sandpaper around a pencil, or let them keep hold of that little bit of blu-tac they always seem to have clutched between their grubby fingers. Get them sharpening their own pencils. Bearing in mind that good fine motor control springs from a strong central core and shoulder girdle, you could put their painting on the floor, or on an easel; it doesn’t have to be all high-cost assistive technology. A wander down to the Early Years might be all it takes. 

And when they play that maths game, maybe they could use a variety of objects in place of counters or multilink. Pasta, lentils, sequins, grains of rice; objects decreasing in size that need posting into the right sized holes can all be used to support skills in fine motor control, and not only that, they invest the activity with meaning.

Sometimes we overcomplicate things in our drive for simplification and clarity.  And when we do that we need to remind ourselves that learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum, and that the incidentals matter. It is a multifaceted beast, this education animal, and a seamless integration of skills and knowledge, while defying the simple, single learning objective, ensures that, while they are busy learning one thing, they are catching another.

About the author

Nancy Gedge is a primary teacher in Gloucestershire. She blogs at http://www.notsoordinarydiary.wordpress.com