Stepping stones

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.

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.

Creativity is the ability to imagine, build and implement something new or to discover an original solution to a problem. It is, therefore, not limited to the arts alone and develops gradually from the age of 18 months. Given its importance in a child’s development, we should seize every opportunity to stimulate it daily. Indeed, a child who has learned to be creative will have good problem-solving and conflict-solving skills, expressing themselves, exploring and finding new ideas. All types of games and activities contribute to nurturing creativity. It is important to provide the child with a variety of materials that the child can explore and use as he or she pleases. In children’s games, an ordinary piece of fabric suddenly becomes a cape, a picnic mat, a blanket for dolls, and so much more! Books, nursery rhymes, dressing-up and improvisation games, for example, fuel the imagination in wonderful ways and inspire fun in the young and old alike.