Bazillion Buckets

Space and time are at the heart of children's daily activities: drawing, writing, moving a piece on a game board, putting together a puzzle or building a building, as well as identifying landmarks to get from one point to another. All of these call for spatial organization and orientation. Furthermore, telling a story, correctly ordering a sequence of events, learning the time, and carrying out an activity in a set amount of time all call for temporal organization and orientation. All of these concepts are gradually developed through various motor and cognitive skills. This is easily observed in the development of children's language when they use the words inside, outside, next to, behind, before, after, yesterday and tomorrow. In short, skills related to spatial and temporal organization impact several areas of children's development.

Gross motor skills include balance, coordination, lateralization, strength, endurance, etc. Motor skills involve performing body movements and maintaining positions. Like all other skills, motor skills are acquired through practice, and repetition allows them to be refined and developed further. Motor activities and games promote spatial orientation and encourage children and adults alike to expend their energy in a positive way. The same activity often adapts well to children at different stages of development.

We ask children to exercise this skill every day in a multitude of activities. It is important to know that observation is never practiced alone: observing always requires concentration. This allows us to maintain attention while we gather information and commit it to our memory. How can we encourage the development of observation skills in children? First, it is important that the type of game and the difficulty level chosen are adapted to the child. The environment must be conducive to focus; it is essential to limit sources of distraction and to make the child comfortable. Guiding the child by asking questions can also help. To stimulate observation skills, we usually gravitate towards memory games, sorting games, sequence games or puzzles of all kinds, and that is great! But observation can also be practiced with all our senses. There are a variety of materials and activities that allow children to listen, touch, taste, look, smell, etc.