Classes of first-graders at school are spread out across the gymnasium space. Each has a small racquet and a foam ball. The teacher periodically asks the students to try a new way to strike the ball with the racquet, most often in the form of a question: “Can you keep the ball up in front of you by hitting it softly?
A student occasionally loses control of his or her ball, but retrieves it without interfering with the activity of classmates. It gradually becomes clear that the progression of activities is leading toward the development of striking skills that will be useful later in sports such as tennis, badminton, softball, hockey, and lacrosse.
With each series of questions asked by the teacher, the children are carefully guided toward forehand, backhand, overhand, and underhand striking patterns. The children do not know or care, for that matter that eventually this will all lead somewhere.
They are obviously enjoying the activity for what it is at the moment. There is no competition among the children. The learning is success oriented. The children often have to make decisions about what they will do in response to the prompts and questions from the teacher.
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Movement education use movement skills, rather than traditional sport skills, as organizing centres for activity. The children in this program will have units in striking, throwing/tossing, catching, and dodging. Later, in upper elementary grades, they will use these skills in the more conventional games that dominate the curriculum.
Movement-education curricula are most often divided into the areas of educational games, educational gymnastics, and educational dance. The “themes” from which curricular units are developed are movement themes, rather than sport themes.
In the educational- gymnastics portion of the curriculum, children will have lessons that focus on balance, transferring weight, hanging and swinging, bearing weight on different body parts, and locomotion both on the feet and on different body parts.
Small apparatuses such as boxes, benches, balance beams, bars, ropes, rings, and inclined planks will be used as aides in exploring movement possibilities.
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This approach to physical education stresses the cognitive involvement of children, the development of positive self-concepts, and the establishment of a broad repertoire of movement skills.