Promoting Physical Literacy in Early Childhood: Evidence-Based Recommendations from SKIP

This presentation will take an early years physical literacy approach to promoting actual and perceived motor competence in young children from disadvantaged environments and elucidating the role motor competence plays in leading a physically active lifestyle and maintaining a healthy weight. Many vulnerable (poor, urban environments) children enter the early childhood years with significant delays in critical fundamental motor skills that are the prerequisites to later sports and physical activity. This is compounded by significant barriers (lack of built/home environment, access, poverty, role models) in their communities to being physically active. In spite of these delays and barriers, such young children reveal positive perceptions of their motor competence, an asset that can be used in intervention. The `Successful Kinesthetic Instruction for Preschoolers` (SKIP) motor skill intervention was developed to address these deficits and counter the negative developmental trajectories of these children. Situated in dynamic systems theory and Newell’s constraints, the overarching purpose of SKIP is to promote actual and perceived motor competence, enhance motivations to be active, develop knowledge of their body’s response to activity; and more recently, promote physical literacy. In all SKIP interventions, we started by considering child constraints, then manipulated environmental constraints to design high quality tasks aligned to a child’s developmental level to positively influence actual and perceived motor competence and physical literacy. Within this presentation, I will chart the evolution of SKIP reporting data from a number of studies and highlighting lessons learned along the way. I will start with the expert-led direct-instructional approaches leading to more mastery-oriented, child-centered approaches to SKIP. From this work, we recognized the need for more translational research. Thus, I will summarize our most recent work where we have collaborated with teachers to deliver T-SKIP/SKIP Cymru/INDO -SKIP and an integrated FMS-reading literacy (RaMMP) intervention to children across the world. I will conclude with implications for physical educators, future early intervention research, and the importance of promoting actual and perceived motor competence during this critical window of development.