Over the course of last semester and
this semester, the children have been working on their bodies and how to
balance them. This is very important at
their age because they are gaining a lot of body awareness and learning that
they have control over how their bodies move.
We wanted to offer the children multiple opportunities to explore that
this term as it if something they are still very curious about.
Last time, the children had the opportunity
to walk on the balance beam. This was a
good way to see how their strategies would chance depending on how comfortable
they were on the beam and with their own body movements. We saw a range of strategies used by the
children.
To continue this with the children,
we brought a tumble mat into the classroom.
This gave the children the opportunity to practice their balancing in a
different way. We first looked at videos
of gymnasts performing floor routines and talked about how they were moving their
bodies.
The children loved this and began to
try some different ways of manipulating their own bodies. We saw some of the yoga poses that the
children had worked on last semester incorporated with some new moves that
might have been inspired by the gymnastics we were talking about.
Throughout this experience we were
able to see lots of new ways of moving on the part of the children and they
were able to watch and each other and challenge each other. We are going to bring in the shadow screen next
week so the children can watch their bodies and the bodies of the other
children as they move about.
