Room 2 - Curriculum Room (Section 2 of 8)
Section 2 - Body and spatial awareness
Description of body and spatial awareness
This area of the curriculum is particularly concerned with key skills and concepts that are developed from a very early age and underpin more high level activities such as advanced travel and some aspects of independent living skills.
Skellenger and Hill (1997) describe the teaching of mobility to young children as a process of ensuring they are aware of and able to use the ‘building blocks’ upon which are built later mobility skills. These might include sensory awareness, body image and concept, gross and fine motor activities, and conceptual awareness, ‘building blocks’ that were built into the curriculum framework.
A list of key skills
In our research we spoke to many professionals involved in working with visually impaired children. Here we present a list of some of the key body and spatial awareness skills which they felt were important. This list is a useful start, though it does not necessarily cover everything.
List: Early and foundation mobility and independence - body and spatial awareness.
Early sensory-motor development and posture, including pre-school.
- Early movement.
- Exercises for flexibility and muscle tone.
- General play involving movement.
- General encouragement in exploration and reaching for objects.
- Walking, running, skipping, jumping, dancing.
- Corrective work on gait, eradicating stamping when walking.
- Body posture.
- Senses
Spatial language.
- Recognising and responding to voices.
- Body parts.
- Spatial language – under, behind, next to, up, down, etc.
- Object-to-object and object-to-body relationships.
- Directions.
Understanding and interacting with immediate and extended areas of space.
- Desk-top finding activities.
- Finding dropped articles.
- Layout of rooms – moving around a room, finding objects in a room.
- Lunch room.
- Moving around home.
- Moving around the (school) campus and playground.
- Moving around a shop, building.
Early strategies and techniques, including ‘pre-cane skills’.
- Protection.
- Trailing.
- Early cane work and use of pre-cane.
- Landmarks on sighted guided ‘journeys’, classroom to classroom, within room. Wheelchair use and skills.
Overcoming anxiety and fear of movement – encouraging confidence.
‘Transferability of skills’ and ‘problem solving’.
As with all parts of the M&I curriculum, this overlaps with other curriculum areas, and work carried out by other professionals. In the case of body and spatial awareness skills the following may be useful:
Foundation curriculum
Good Practice: Some examples of ‘body and spatial awareness’ teaching activities
In the research project many professionals gave examples of their work, including many ‘body and spatial awareness’ teaching activities:
A curriculum used by one mobility officer includes a lot of body awareness. Activities might include a child learning to locate objects on a table through instructions given by the mobility officer, so that they learn about the language of body parts and directions, space, objects and about movement – things that sighted people don’t normally think about because they can see. GLASGOW
Examples of how children are taught spatial awareness include the following: when sitting at their desk, they need to understand and explore all the things that they can touch, things that are beyond the self. The table, then the wall, the cupboard behind. Helping children realise it’s not only things they can physically touch, but that there are things beyond that you can’t touch. The first thing is understanding yourself, your body and how things move. EDINBURGH
A mobility officer teaches body parts so that children know and understand their bodies. With preschool and primary children and some children with MDVI, she uses games – for example ‘Simon Says’. RHONDDA CYNAN TAFF
Preschool children can be taught skills like concept development about the environment and language about the environment such as ‘under’, as well as body awareness and physical movement. DERBYSHIRE
The team works with children from three years of age and starts them on simple cane work (e.g. touch technique) as it’s important to develop the correct skills at an early age. HULL
One authority works with parents and children from birth on pre-requisite mobility skills, including listening skills and encouraging them to reach out and explore, and sighted guide technique. It is important to promote exploratory techniques, to encourage the child to move with dignity through flexibility exercises, and to improve their gait and posture, so that the child is ready to start on more formal mobility work when they attend school. HULL
With younger children, work involves a lot of concept building and body awareness, balance and co-ordination. Concept building includes positional concepts like up, down, in, out, and body awareness like moving the body different ways, spatial relationships like object to object relationships and object to body relationships. ROTHERHAM
Activity 3
Think about your role in the education of visually impaired children. Some of the following questions may be relevant to you:
- If you work directly with young and developmentally young children with a visual impairment, think about which of these activities might be useful in your work. Think about what you do, and how it fits in.
- If you are not directly involved in this work, think about how important these skills are, and how often they are ‘pre-requisites’ for other aspects of the M&I curriculum. Think about which other professionals are involved in this work, and how you interact with one another.
- If you are a parent, think about how you engage with your child in this way, and which professionals and services you can seek advice from.
- If you are involved in the management of a service, think about which professionals within and beyond your service you draw upon, how you involve parents and carers in this process, and how all these people communicate with one another.
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