At be.Living, children come in contact with physical activity at a very young age. After all, each person’s body is a fundamental tool for communicating and interacting with the world. Thus, acknowledging and exploring it through various practices is a key to a child’s healthy development.
Physical Education classes, sports, and physical games are part of children’s routine, promoting awareness of movement and developing motor, mental, emotional, and social skills beyond the sidelines.
We often don’t realize of how much a learning experience provided through sports may be collaborating with other learning experiences, be it at home, in social situations, or in the classroom. Our coordinator for Early Childhood Education, Camila Maia, explains that, among other things, exercising body control through games can help a small child learn how to hold a pencil, providing more control so that he or she can draw and learn how to write. “It is interesting to look at sports and physical activities as playful and powerful means of learning that can be extended from the micro to the macro, from a game or play to life.”
Starting at Yellow Orange, the children participate in body movement activities and are also invited to learn about different sports in extracurricular activities such as soccer, ballet, capoeira, judo and tennis. Physical Education classes start when children move to Blue, where they participate in playful activities with sports themes, but not in the form of the game itself, as explained by Fabio Cabiana, Physical Education teacher and be.Living’s extracurricular activities advisor: “These are games that stimulate the development of basic motor skills such as holding, throwing, jumping and kicking, preparing them for team sports. We use different materials to help improve movement, body, spatial and balance notions.
The teacher explains that sports activities bring several benefits to children, both physically and mentally. “Sports is where they start paying more attention to their bodies, discovering skills and some characteristics such as strength and speed. By having to play within the rules of sports and other games, they develop values, such as respecting peers and accepting the result and knowing that, in victory or defeat, what really matters is that everyone participates and has fun. They also learn about how important each one of them are to their team, developing a collective consciousness. This is a point that is really stressed during the classes: the importance of group work, aimed at the growth of cooperation among students, plus the work of individual improvement.
Coordinator Camila Maia reminds us that sports allow children to deal with different emotions, especially frustration. “Sports often involve competition, winning or losing, being in some position or place. That leads to frustration, which is an important lesson that every human being needs to learn. Here at school we intentionally create various situations so that children can treat frustration as a learning experience, so that they learn how to deal with this feeling. And sports can help them do that in a playful, pleasant, and light-hearted way.”
