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But social and physical participation on the playground is important for them—to ensure healthy habits, to reduce the likelihood of childhood obesity, and to increase the likelihood that they will make friends and become part of the active social groups that form in unstructured free time. Being physically active starts early in life, and having the skills required for physical activity is critical. This is an excerpt from Let’s Play: Promoting Active Playgrounds by Jane Watkinson.
We also need to be able to identify children who lack the skills to participate during their school years and provide them with the extra teaching and practice they need in order to develop a good repertoire of skills for play. A good skill repertoire does not, however, appear automatically: The more free-play time available to children, the greater the chance that their repertoire will expand. Boys’ playgroups tend to be somewhat larger than girls’, and girls tend to play more ...
Children master new skills in an environment that encourages skill development and positive interactions. In addition to helping children develop performance skills, you should equip each child with knowledge of the basic rules and simple strategies of typical playground games. But if Mom and Dad constantly compare their child negatively with other children, especially those of similar age or younger, the child may be hesitant to try new things and to practice skills.
In helping a child practice catching a ball that rebounds from a wall, a parent or teacher may toss the ball against the wall. Thus if you are helping a child learn to catch a rebounding ball, it might make sense to mix soft tosses—both high and low—with harder (faster) high and low balls. The child will gain knowledge about ball flights, rebound angle, and speed that will help him or her deal with new rebounds when they are encountered.
In this case, participants bring information from their social networking pages and take on the role of someone else in the group based on the information provided from that person’s page. Prior to the session, print each participant’s profile from his or her social networking page; then, as participants arrive for the session, give each person his or her printed profile page and a name tag to wear in a highly visible fashion. The person who just shared then returns the name tag to its ...
