This article features Childgarden Child Development Center, located in the heart of St. Louis. It's a cheery, bright place with colorful self-portraits by pintsized Picassos hanging from every wall. More than 120 children aged six weeks to eight years old gather at Childgarden each day to learn all about themselves and the world around them. In…

Handwriting currently has a low status and profile in literacy education. This paper examines the situation of current handwriting pedagogy in England and considers why handwriting efficiency has been neglected. The paper goes on to identify a number of studies located in the domains of special needs and psychology which re-evaluate the role of…

At Colorado College, the energy retrofit of a building is used as a service-learning research project to teach physics and chemistry in a variety of courses. In introductory courses for nonscience majors, the project helps students appreciate the scientific method and quantitative reasoning. Within the physical-chemistry course, students see that…

From the first moments of life, infants begin the exciting journey to gain control of their bodies. These beginning movements are an essential way of playing and learning for infants. During their first year, infants learn more motor skills than at any other time in their lives. Brain research has revealed that the motor area of an infant's brain…

The process of art-making is integral to the development of a child's fine motor skills, coordination, and concentration. Therefore, creating an ongoing project one or two weeks in length can benefit both teacher and students. The teacher can assess the children's skills by observing the way they handle materials. Also, after spending valuable…

This article profiles Mike Simmel, a member of the Harlem Wizards professional basketball team and a national spokesman for Epilepsy Awareness. Mike has been diagnosed with epilepsy when he was two-years-old. At age seven, his father gave him a basketball to see if working with the ball would help him overcome his motor skills issues. Mike first…

Although significant attention has been given to promoting physical activity among children, little attention has been given to the developmental process of how children learn to move or to the changing role that motor skill development plays in children's physical activity levels as they grow. In order to successfully address the obesity…

Like other developmental disorders such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, specific language impairment and dyslexia, there is no shortage of debate surrounding the condition of Developmental Coordination Disorder. The present article takes a global view of many of these debatable issues, starting with definition and terminology, moving…

Four principles are drawn from approximately 100 years of research in the area of motor development. The principles are (1) children are not miniature adults, (2) boys and girls (children) are more alike than different, (3) good things are earned, and (4) no body (nobody) is perfect. Five sections of this article introduce some of the major…

Describes a neuropsychological theory of motor-skill learning that is based on the idea that learning grows directly out of motor-control processes. The theory accounts for patterns of impairment of motor-skill learning in patient populations and for learning-related changes in activity in functional imaging studies. (SLD)

The Pre-Kindergarten Inventory of Demonstrated Skills (Pre-KIDS) is designed to be used before the school year begins so that teachers and staff can obtain information about incoming kindergarten students. This information is intended to give teachers insight about what skills a student may or may not have before entering their classrooms. This…

A simple instance of coupling behavior to the environment is oscillating the hands in pace with metronome beats. This environmental coupling can be weaker (1 beat per cycle) or stronger (2 beats per cycle). The authors examined whether strength of environmental coupling enhanced the stability of in-phase bimanual coordination. Detuning by…

Physical educators are faced with many challenges when it comes to helping students learn movement skills, but taking time for explicit planning can overcome many of these obstacles. A simple, yet effective tool that should be part of every lesson is the instructional cue. The purpose of this article is fourfold. First, it describes what…

The actions of the individual extraocular muscles are best explained to medical students in a lecture format by showing the relationship of each muscle to the axes of the globe and the walls of the bony orbit. The lateral and medial rectus muscles cross only the vertical axis, and consequently, cause only abduction and adduction, respectively.…

Today, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is the most common and most studied psychiatric disorder of childhood, affecting approximately five percent of school-aged children. That means that there are probably at least two children with ADHD in any average elementary school class. In the last 20 years, there has been an explosion in…