Motor Skills Development in Children: Milestones and Concepts

Developing Motor Skills

Rolling, Crawling, and Creeping:

• Spins about its longitudinal axis is one more automated motor pattern at 6 months.
• Creeping usually occurs around 5 months.
• From 6 to 8 months, infants are capable of creeping effectively.
• Crawling starts around 8 to 10 months.

Walking:

• The first steps are a constant search for equilibrium and stability.
• Standing upright at 12 months and starting to walk around 14/15 months; there is great variability in their first steps from 9 to 18 months, depending on development.

Running:

• The first actions similar to running appear as an uncontrolled gait around 18/20 months.
• By age 5, children can run with some ease.

Jumping:

• After an acceptable performance level in gait, around age 4, jumping becomes possible without serious difficulty.

Releasing:

• From 6 months through 3 and a half years, releasing involves movement only of the arms.
• From 5 years, children usually perform a step forward to release.

Receptions:

• Requires synchronization with the moving object's trajectory, a complex skill.
• 50% develop the ability by age 5.
• At 7, children show effectiveness in implementation.

Space

The environment where the child moves and interacts, and through their senses, tests their personal experience to help them develop body awareness and orientation.

Spatial Location

The ability to place objects in relation to each other.

Spatial Orientation

The skill of orienting oneself with respect to space.

Spatial Structuring

The capacity to orient oneself on where objects and individuals are in space.

Time

The concept of physical time is a human refinement of sensations of before and after, so the child perceives phenomena of greater or lesser duration.

Rhythm

Represents a synthesis of notions of order and length and is the basis of temporal experience.

Guidelines for Educational Proposals

A) Organizing Time:

1. Assessing rates.
2. Concept of duration, distinguishing different time frames (long, short).
3. Continuity and discontinuity: perceiving actions as followed or interrupted.
4. Concept of interval: interpreting actions, passivity, or inaction.

B) Relationships in Time:

1. Relating simultaneity and succession. Actions made at one time and another compared afterward.
2. Different moments of time: notions of before and after.

C) Coordinating Various Elements:

1. Combined movements: acceleration/deceleration.
2. Assessing speeds of colleagues or moving objects: actions to distinguish different speeds of displacements.

D) Accompaniment with Musical Evolution:

• Individual, couples, groups.