Over, Under, Through
Our Junior GymKids will explore spatial & body awareness in our next fun theme, over, under and through!
Spatial and body awareness is crucial to motor planning – a skill which is not only important for gymnastics, but for ensuring fluent movement for life! Our little under 5 gymnasts will practice moving their bodies in various spatial challenges – obstacle course style and will have fun maneuvering themselves over the equipment, under the equipment and through the equipment around the gym!
Children experience spatial concepts with their body, wiring up the spatial parts of the brain, before understanding and translating them to the rest of their world.
We need good spatial awareness for all sorts of things; maneuvering our bodies around the playground, driving a car, running over hurdles, kicking a ball – and especially, when we learn how to write. To write a letter on a page our children need to know where and how to move their pencil from one point to another (ie. writing the letters under and over the line – like in this letter Gg!)
In this theme, our Jnr Gym Kids coaches will encourage the language of over, under and through in every warm up, rotation, obstacle course and activity. Using this prepositional language, combined with movement will help cement the concepts for our children. As well as forming body maps in their brains, children are developing spatial maps and concepts directly through their movement experiences.
Everyone loves an obstacle course and we can’t wait for lots of movement fun in the gym during our next awesome Jnr Gym Kids theme!