Motor Development
Motor skills are usually divided into two basic categories – gross and fine motor skills.
Gross motor skills
Gross motor skills include the movement of the larger arm, leg and torso muscle groups. Often these are actions that include: walking, running, skipping rope, jumping, throwing, climbing and so on. The development of gross motor skills influences fine motor skills, orientation with regards to the body and spatial orientation. Age-appropriate development of gross motor skills also helps children socialize, because it allows them to participate in games with other children.
With body elongation, the center of gravity is transferred downwards to the torso. The result of this is a better body balance which gives the child an opportunity to acquire new skills including larger muscle groups. Before their second year, children are more or less able to jump and run. The more stable their legs grow as a base, the freer their experimentation with new hand movements is – throwing and catching a ball, riding a tricycle/bicycle, hula hooping and so on. Gradually, movements start to include the whole body and by the end of the pre-school period children manage to build up stamina and speed in movement.
Synchronized movements of the major muscle groups are the result of so-called bilateral integration – the ability to coordinate both halves of the body at the same time. Good coordination between both cerebral hemispheres is a necessary precondition here. Bilateral coordination develops across the following stages:
1. Symmetrical bilateral integration – both sides of the body are engaged in executing mirror-like movements (e.g. clapping hands).
2. Reciprocal bilateral integration – both sides of the body are engaged in executing movements in opposing directions (e.g. stretching hands in the opposite directions).
3. Asymmetrical bilateral integration – every body part plays its role in executing different movement (e.g. a child who is kicking a ball).
4. Crossing the “midline” (the geometrical center of the body) – this skill looks like the ability to move a hand/foot into the field of the corresponding opposing limb (hand/foot); e.g. crossing legs, drawing crossing lines without changing the drawing hand and so on.
Successful mastery of writing, drawing and reading is related to the previous two developmental phases of bilateral integration (asymmetrical bilateral integration and crossing the midline).
Fine motor skills
Fine motor skills consist coordination of the movement of fine/small muscle groups of the hands and fingers. A sufficient level of fine motor skills is a requirement for successful mastery of writing, cutting, using cutlery, assembling puzzles, tying laces, getting dressed / undressing, etc. It has been show that there is a connection between acquiring fine motor skills and the development of speech. Fine motor skill development is also associated with the development of attention, memory and cognition, according to some experts.
Almost all of the abovementioned actions require a so called “leading hand” (either left or right) and a “supporting hand” (the other one). Often the dominant hand manifests itself around the age of 3–4 years but is consolidated around the age of 6–7 years. The dominant hand is the one handling the task – cutting with scissors, writing or drawing with a pen or similar tool – while the supporting hand is the one stabilizing the action – holding the sheet of paper in place or rotating it if needed. The quality of these activities is also influenced by the grasp a child uses.
There are several grip types according to the level of development:
• Palmer grasp – typical for children under 1 year old.
• Palmar supinate grasp (with thump up or down) – the child uses four fingers to close over the whole object and uses the thumb for balance. This grip provides better control when lifting smaller objects, but remains rather inefficient and clumsy. The child holds writing implements pressed into the palm while drawing (in this case more a kind of random tracing of lines), with movement flowing from the shoulder.
• Digital pronate grasp – appears between the second and third years of age, the child can hold writing implements in their hands.
• Pincer grasp (quadrupod to tripod) – should appear by five years of age, so that the child can properly master it before starting elementary school.
Progress in fine motor skills is visible to the caregivers in two main domains:
1) taking care of one’s own body,
2) a child’s drawings.
• Drawing
With the child’s increasing skills to mentally visualize and “see” the surrounding world, their drawings start to “make sense”:
There are other factors, which, in combination with developing fine motor skills, have an impact on changing the drawings of children. For example: becoming aware of the idea that a drawing can serve the purpose of a symbol, improvements in planning and visual-spatial orientation.
The development of drawing skills is also related to the significance of artistic expression in a given culture.
Childhood progress in drawing skills often moves through specific stages:
1. Scribbles – the image is represented rather as gestures than the resulting shapes captured on the paper. The children move their drawing instruments about and observe the marks left behind. The movement itself is more interesting than the result.
2. First representational forms – around the age of 3, children’s scribbles start to become pictures. Often children make a gesture with a crayon, notice that they have drawn a recognizable shape, and then label it. Few 3-year-olds spontaneously draw in ways others can tell what their picture represents. But when adults draw with children and point out the resemblances between drawing and objects, preschoolers’ pictures become more comprehensible and detailed.
3. More realistic drawings – they occur gradually, as perception, language (ability to describe visual details), memory and fine motor capacities improve. Five and six-year olds create more complex drawings, which contain more conventional human and animal figures, with head and body differentiated.
Early writing
At first, preschoolers do not distinguish writing from drawing. When they try to write, they scribble, just as they do when they draw. Around the age of 4, writing shows some distinctive features of print, such as separate forms arranged in a line on the page. Children often include picture-like devices in their writing – for example using a circular shape to write “sun”. Only gradually, between the ages of 4 and 6, do children realize that writing stands for language. Preschoolers’ first attempts to write letters often involve their name.
Gender differences
Sex differences in motor skills are evident in early childhood (preschool years). Boys are ahead of girls in skills that emphasize force and power. By the age of 5, they can jump slightly farther, run slightly faster, and throw a ball farther than girls. Girls have an edge in fine motor skills and in certain gross motor skills that require a combination of good balance and foot movement such as hopping and skipping.