This can again be incorporated alongside many other FMS’.
Or your simple hopscotch is hard to beat.Ĭoordination– The ability to integrate different body parts in harmony during movement. My personal favourite here involves single leg challenges, where children throw a bean bag/ softball to each other while standing on one leg or hop on one leg along a line in the playground. This can be on one leg or two and from standing still to hopping and landing. This forces the child to react and change direction at short notice.īalance– The ability to maintain stability in relation to the immediate environment. A personal favourite is running bumper cars, where we set up a square where the children run around, and the child must change direction every time they end up facing another child’s back. This could be a timed set of cone touches in a defined area or moving to avoid a bean bag/ softball that is rolled or thrown toward the child. Think here of any activity where the child has to change direction or dodge something moving towards them. In their coach development courses, they break these into three categories: the ABC’s, RJT’s and CPKS’.Īgility– The ability to change direction quickly while maintaining balance and control of the whole body. We can separate FMS into a number of different categories personally, I am a big fan of The GAA and Camogie approach to the FUNdamentals. These skills are the “building blocks” for more complex and specialised skills that children will need throughout their lives to competently participate in a variety of games, sports, or just for fun, from the playground right up to adulthood. The aim of this blog is to hopefully give you some ideas and general structure that can encourage the development of Fundamental Movement Skills (FMS) in children, that can be used at all ages in a fun, non-structured and non-pressured way be that in a half-hour spent in the park, or 5 minutes in the sitting room (possibly with all fragile objects well hidden).įundamental movement skills can be defined as a specific set of skills that involve different body parts such as feet, legs, trunk, head, arms and hands. The dawn of tablets, PlayStation and Peppa Pig have no doubt affected our children’s desire to play in the physical sense. We have all heard the commentary that our children do not get the unstructured physical activity that we all got in our early years.