28 PART 1 Introduction and Content Overview www.mhhe.com/graham8e
O
ur primary goal is to provide children with a
degree of competence leading to the confi dence
that encourages them to become, and remain,
physically active for a lifetime. Our intent is to help
children gain enough skills and confi dence for them to
participate enjoyably in many activities, not just a few
traditional team sports, and to avoid the abysmal failure
and embarrassment that often result from a total lack of
skill. By focusing on learning and practicing skills rather
than on the rules or structure of a game or sport, we can
dramatically increase the amount of practice the children
actually receive, thereby heightening their opportunities
to learn the fundamental motor skills that form the foun-
dation for becoming a lifetime mover. We are also able to
do this in ways that children fi nd enjoyable.
objects of various sizes, shapes, heights, et cetera, the
student will have more effective “elements” for the per-
formance of the next jumping tasks (e.g., the running
long jump in high school).
— R
ICHARD SCHMIDT , “Schema Theory:
Implications for Movement Education”
• Children need to become suffi ciently competent in basic
motor skills if they are going to eventually enjoy playing
sports or games as teens and adults.
• In the elementary school, the emphasis is placed on
practicing motor skills rather than learning rules or the
structures of sports.
• Skill themes are analogous to verbs (i.e., they are action
words). They are subdivided into three categories: loco-
motor, nonmanipulative, and manipulative skills.
• Movement concepts are analogous to adverbs (i.e., they
describe how an action is performed). They are also sub-
divided into three categories: space awareness, effort,
and relationships.
• In the primary grades, movement concepts are taught
before the skill themes.
• The movement analysis framework “wheel” is based on an
analysis of human movement and describes how the skill
themes and movement concepts interact with one another.
• The “spirals” outline a developmentally appropriate pro-
gression for each of the skill themes.
• Children Moving directly addresses national and many
state physical education standards.
Key Concepts
Typically, children who are learning to read are
taught fi rst to recognize letters, then parts of words,
then complete words, and fi nally sentences. Children
who are studying mathematics learn to solve problems
after they’ve grasped the basic functions of numbers
and signs. Children learning to play a musical instru-
ment typically study the scale before attempting a
song. In physical education, however, all too often
children are taught games, dances, or complex gym-
nastic stunts before they’re able to adequately perform
fundamental motor skills. Too often, children know
the rules for a game or the formation of a dance but
don’t have the motor skills needed for successful and
enjoyable participation. Our way of teaching children
how to participate effectively in various activities is to
focus on the development of the necessary motor
skills. We call this approach teaching by skill themes.
One of the easiest ways to understand skill themes is
to think of a popular sport. Let’s pick softball. What
skills do people use when they play softball? The major
ones include throwing, catching, batting, and running.
Let’s pick another popular sport—basketball. Throw-
ing, catching, running, dribbling with hands, jumping
and landing, and chasing and fl eeing skills are used
frequently in basketball (Figure 2.2). Obviously we
could list a number of other sports. The point is that
some of the same skills—for example, throwing, catch-
ing, and running—are used in both sports, and in
many more sports that you know of. Thus if children
learn to throw and catch, for example, their odds of
playing and enjoying a sport such as softball or basket-
ball increase, because they have a reasonable chance to
succeed at that sport. We have termed these skill themes
because they apply to many different sports, although
the way they are used (the context) differs from one
sport to another. Table 3.1 lists various skill themes and
indicates which sports emphasize them.
Characteristics of Themes
In music, a theme recurs in different parts of a song, some-
times in exactly the same way, at other times in a slightly
different form. The Random House Dictionary of the English
Language defi nes theme as “a short melodic subject from
Essentially, the notion is that these elements (funda-
mental motor skills) are learned in early life through the
various activities performed (such as jumping, throwing,
striking, and the like), and then when a new act is to
be learned in later life, the student can piece together
these elements in a more effi cient way to achieve the
new motor goal. The assumption is that by jumping over
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