Children’s motor skills tend to deteriorate during the school year, so concentrate on getting them back on track during the summer break

HERE’S A quick game for your kids – how long can they balance on one leg? A seven-year-old should be able to muster about 30 seconds of flamingo impersonating, and that’s the kind of exercise that physiotherapist Dr Amanda Connell has been using with primary-school children in west Cork to encourage their balance and motor skills.

In a study of about 200 children aged six to eight, she found that children’s motor skill development tended to deteriorate over the course of the school year (September to June), but that with short, game-based interventions the decline was less marked.

“The problem occurs when they go into school and there are so many demands on their development.

“They have fewer opportunities to develop their motor skills as they are sitting still, and because we don’t do simple games like kick the can, or some schools don’t allow running in the yard, it’s making children vulnerable,” says Dr Connell, a Health Research Board fellow at the University of Limerick’s department of physiotherapy.

“They don’t get to practise things like balance and co-ordination, or listening and moving.”

If children don’t develop and practise such skills, then they may be at risk of developmental delay.

Using party games, Dr Connell did eight classes of about 25 minutes per week with groups of children, with the emphasis on fun. The children had to follow instructions for movements, including “granny’s footsteps”, where they crept up behind her back but had to freeze when she turned around.

“It was really important to make the specific exercises fun and interesting so children would practise them,” she says.

Initially Dr Connell found that many children were unable to stand on one leg for half a minute, but she was quickly able to single the more co- ordinated ones who had been doing it in other activities, such as Irish dancing and tae kwon do.

Reaction to the classes was positive, and Dr Connell hopes to roll the interventions out on a wider level.

Meanwhile she encourages parents to engage their children in games that involve balance and co-ordination, so they rev up their motor skills over the summer.

“Get them going in party games, play hopscotch on the beach,” she suggests. “I think a lot of the kids pick up again over the summer, so now is the time.

“Because if you start into the school year with poor motor skills, they are likely to be worse by the end of the year and this knocks on into other areas of development.”