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Movement Heroes Philosophy in FMS
Implicit Learning of motor skill through external cues.
Find it tough to teach your child FMS? Fret not! Through tried and tested methods, our coaches use our philosophy of implicit learning to help children understand and achieve FMS.
There are three 3 stages of Fundamental Movement Skills; Initial (Beginner), Elementary (Middle) and Mature (Proficient).
When learning the different FMS, most children will experience the same progression from the initial to the mature stage. However, the time taken to reach the mature stage differs among children and largely depends on practice opportunities, instruction & feedback and encouragement.
Play and instructional experiences have a significant influence on the rate of the development of these skills. Hence, in Movement Heroes, we consistently emphasize that children learn FMS in a fun, yet productive way.
And this led us to create the cue cards, where we provide external / analogical cues for children to learn FMS.
Implicit learning was first founded by Masters (1992), who claims that, in principle, motor learning can occur without awareness of what is learned.
Masters found out that implicit learning does not occupy much attention and mental capacity and is more durable over time, thereby coming up with the ‘reinvestment of explicit knowledge’ hypothesis.
This hypothesis is supported by Liao and Masters (2001), where they found out that Implicit Learning allows the learner to learn better as their performance are not likely to be interfered by the stress created by the needs to internalize the different body cues to execute the movement.
This is in line with the philosophy followed by Movement Heroes, which is to allow young children to learn FMS in a fun and exciting way.
The cues that are used in Movement Heroes further emphasize our idea of implicit learning. Cues are an essential part of motor learning.
They are short task-oriented phrases, verbally administered to the learners before or during the performance of a motor skill (Benz, Winkelman, Porter, & Nimphius, 2016).
Betz et al. (2016) further explains that cues can exist in both internal and external forms. The external cues focus on the learner’s movement externally in relation to the environment.
One of the prime examples of external cues is the use of analogies or metaphors to help learners develop motor skills. In analogy learning, the learner will learn the motor skill and express knowledge associated with the analogy (Liao & Masters, 2001).
They also further explained that analogy learning reduces the amount of information explicitly attended to during motor learning.
By converting the skill into a simple, yet meaningful biomechanical metaphor, the attention demands on one’s working memory to produce these movements is reduced.
Too much information overpowers the working memory, which reduces the fun element in the learning process. Hence, in other words, the cue cards in Movement Heroes aim to teach young learners the complex FMS through a simple biomechanical metaphor that can be reproduced by the learner.
Fitts and Posner’s Three Stage Model
According to Fitts and Posner (Fitts & Posner, 1967), the learning process involves three different stages and children learn new skill better under the easiest condition.
The ‘golden years’ of motor skills acquisition is 2-6 years old. However, at that age, the vocabulary of the children is still limited and the link between the name and the action of the skill is an abstract concept for them.
Hence, we provide children the opportunity to understand how these FMS are executed by using short and simple metaphorical cues. These metaphorical cues take into consideration the things that children come across in their daily life, and is expressed in simple language.
In addition, the practice in this stage should be more performance focused while incorporating a mental image. Thus, this method not only enhances the child’s cognitive abilities, but also develops in them a sense of autonomy and initiative in testing their limbs. It also helps bridge the abstract concept and allow the children to make a link between the name and the execution of the skill.