Movement Skills. Movement skills may be defined as identifiable movement patterns which are used to accomplish certain tasks. A better understanding of specific movement skills may be gained by categorizing them into a four-level developmental hierarchy.

At the bottom of the hierarchy are reflexes, which dominate the motor behaviour of infants for the first three or four months after birth. Example of primitive reflexes are the grasp reflex, elicited by placing an object in an infant’s hand and the stepping reflex, elicited by holding an infant upright and gently bouncing his/her feet on a table or floor.

The early locomotors milestones-including rolling over, creeping, crawling, standing, walking with support, and walking independently-are at the next level up the hierarchy. These locomotors milestones usually appear between four and thirteen months, with the onset of independent walking marking the end of infancy and the beginning of toddlerhood.

In the 1950s and 1960s some theorists hypothesized that infants who do not show the “normal” sequence of early locomotors milestones are at greater risk for learning and/or speech problems, but there has been little evidence reported to support this notion.

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The third level is comprised of what are usually called fundamental motor skills which emerge from the end of infancy to about six or seven years of age. These include locomotors skills such as running, jumping, hopping, galloping, and skipping, and object control skills such as throwing, catching, striking, kicking, and dribbling.

Although specialized movement skills are observed in earlier years, they are primarily learned after fundamental motor skills are intact, from about six to seven years and throughout a person’s lifetime.