Other Skills to Develop
While it is easy to understand why physical literacy needs to include the skills of running, jumping, throwing kicking, catching, and other skills, along with agility, balance, coordination and speed, there are a couple of other skills that are less obvious. The two most important of these skills are prediction and interception.
Think for a moment about what it takes to catch a softball hit high into the air.
- As the catcher – the child needs to be able to:
- See the ball leave the bat, and predict where it will land.
- Move to where they think the ball will land – and get there for when the ball arrives. This is the ability to intercept the ball, and this is a physical literacy skill that needs to be learned.
Then they need to be able to catch the ball!
This ability to predict and intercept is also critical to many stick, bat and racquet sports, where the child needs to predict where the ball or puck is going, and then move their bat, racquet or stick so that the moving “stick” makes solid contact with the moving “ball”.
Learning this kind of complicated skill requires two things, and is helped by a third:
- Sufficient maturation of the brain and vision – which usually happens between the ages of 4 and 7.
- Lots of opportunity to try to catch, intercept and hit lots of different sized and shaped objects moving in many different directions at many different speeds (although interestingly many children find it much harder to do this with small balls moving slowly, than with balls moving a bit faster).
- Good instruction, particularly about body position and what children should look for, can dramatically help children master this critical physical literacy skill.
FIgure 9 Physical Literacy Leads to an Active Life
