The Importance of Motor Skills (continued)

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Connections to Cognitive Development

Early childhood education is rooted in the belief that learning through doing is fundamental for young children. For example, infants beginning to crawl are working hard to master a physical skill that will enable them to explore more fully the home or school environment. At a slightly older age, walking allows toddlers to have even greater opportunities for touching, manipulating, and creating with the objects around them. During the preschool years, building with a set of blocks allows young children to learn about such mathematical concepts as proportionality and number. Finally, the refinement of fine motor skills in play makes it possible for children to succeed with writing tasks in the primary classroom.

Physical competence is fundamental to cognitive development during early childhood. Montessori (1967) stated that, for learning to reach its full potential, it must be directly connected to physical movement for the young child. This unity of mental and physical activity is at the heart of the Montessori method of education. When the motor skill is directly related to the task being learned, children can understand concepts more completely and quickly. For example, a Montessori material called the Pink Tower is a collection of pink cubes of differing sizes that are designed to be stacked from the largest on the bottom to the smallest on top. As children practice this physical task, they learn about seriation (ordering from largest to smallest), which is a concept essential to later mathematical understanding.

Physical activities provide wonderful opportunities for children to engage in an integrated curriculum. Through the use of play dough, young children are provided exciting opportunities to learn a variety of important concepts.