Forest Gump says he and Jenny go together like peas and carrots. To be honest, I don’t like peas, but I have always loved the concept of two vegetables being perfect for each other and making each other better.
Though jumping and logic go together like peas and carrots, jumping is actually foundational to logic, while carrots are just fine without the peas. Jumping requires a key perceptual motor skill: temporal awareness, the internal understanding of rhythm and time. Temporal awareness is dependent on sequences that follow a specific pattern and order. But this perceptual motor skill has just as much to do with the 3R’s as playing on the playground.
Children first begin to understand rhythms and the passage of time with the general rhythms of life: get up, eat breakfast, brush your teeth, go to school, etc. Having a regular daily schedule with meal time, playtime, school time, and bedtime allows them to internalize that rhythm and begin to understand time. For more on why a schedule is so important check this out.
But there is more to temporal awareness than time. Life is made of rhythms, patterns, and sequences. Children under two begin understanding these concepts when learning temporal awareness through the rhythm of music and the rhythm and sequencing of movements like clapping patterns, walking, and eventually running.
Young children also strengthen their temporal awareness through the rhythm and patterning of language and speech when books are read aloud to them and when they are exposed to and included in conversations.
Children take these rhythms and patterns, learned through moving their bodies, through conversations, from singing songs and read aloud, then internalize them and apply them to classroom skills. Reading uses temporal awareness because it is dependent upon a sequence and pattern. As the eyes move across the page, they must team, or work together, to follow the sequence and pattern of the words. Writing requires the execution of motor movements, through pencil to paper, to take place in a specific order to successfully create a letter or write a sentence. Math requires sequencing and patterning while logic requires the ability to noodle out a sequence to reach a conclusion. If temporal awareness is not well developed, children spend a lot of mental energy focusing on the execution of the action rather than the result and can forget what they are doing in the meantime.
And these connections are all reinforced through movement which helps the brain connect the rhythms, sequences, and patterning of the body’s movement so that the eyes, arms and legs can move in coordination.
Temporal awareness affects controlled movements of walking, running, climbing, skipping, jumping and throwing. The smoother and more coordinated these movements are, the more secure the temporal awareness has become.
Watch a young child begin the process of learning to jump and you will see the development of temporal awareness. Jumping requires a sequence of precise movements to be successful:
- Bend the knees
- Push the hips and weight back
- Push against the floor to extend his legs and begin to propel forward
- Upon landing, bend his knees to cushion his impact.
When a child misses some of the steps, the jump looks awkward, maybe even painful. Some children will land with straight legs, while others attempt to push off the floor and propel forward with straight legs. Through trial and error, they begin to recognize the steps needed for a successful jump and adjust.
The more precise these movements, the more successful the action. This is temporal awareness in movement.
Consider skipping. It incorporates directionality, laterality and temporal awareness. Jumping, as discussed previously, depends only on directionality and temporal awareness.
A child masters a skip by first mastering a gallop, which is actually half of a skip. Very specific steps must happen in order to gallop across a room. The gallop starts with a step and a hop, and continues that pattern always leading with the same foot.
Once galloping is mastered, skipping comes with the same step-hop pattern, but now with alternating feet.
When galloping or skipping, the two sides of the body are being used in completely different ways at different parts of the sequence. So a child needs an internalized understanding of the two different sides of the body and the sequence, rhythm, and timing needed to execute the pattern of movements with success.
Temporal awareness is usually something we develop naturally, behind the scenes while in big body play. The more we move our bodies, the more it is developed and strengthened. More often than not, children will continue to develop these skills through their natural play-based development. However, the two-dimensional world of paper or screen can limit the development of these skills. The more time spent in sedentary activities, the more likely an issue will arise. Keeping kids moving will encourage the development of these crucial skills, and purposeful play can help remediate deficiencies.
Activities and Games to improve Temporal Awareness
Rhythm games are a great way to develop temporal awareness, whether they are clapping patterns, stomping patterns, verbal patterns, or jumping patterns.
- Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack
- Hopscotch
- Jumping: across the floor, down from a low height, or up to a low height.
- Kicking Throwing
- Crawling (Check out more on crawling here)
- Skipping
