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Funtastic Creations is committed to helping children learn to move. The principal aim of the Funtastic Creations program is to develop psychomotor competencies in young children. This involves learning to move with control and efficiency through space. This is commonly referred to as motor development.

The term “movement abilities” refers to the development and refinement of a wide variety of fundamental movement patterns. These are practiced to a point where children are capable of operating with considerable ease and efficiency within their environment. As children mature, the fundamental movement abilities that were developed when they were younger are applied to a wide variety of games and sports that become part of their daily life experiences.

The term “physical abilities” refers to the young child’s ever-increasing ability to function and operate within the environment with regard to his or her level of physical fitness and motor ability.

Movement Abilities

Movement behaviour can be categorised into three broad areas, which are largely overlapping.

Stability – These are activities that develop patters of movement that permit young children to gain and maintain a point of origin for the explorations that they make through space. They are non-locomotor activities including bending, stretching, twisting, turning, rolling etc.

Locomotion – These activities involve projection of the body into external space by altering its location in either a vertical or horizontal plane. Such activities include running, hopping, skipping, galloping and jumping.

Gross Motor Manipulation – These activities develop fundamental manipulative abilities by imparting force to objects such as in throwing, striking, pushing and pulling, and receiving force from objects as with catching, trapping and stacking.

Physical Abilities

Physical Fitness – This is generally termed the ability to perform one’s daily tasks without undue fatigue. The components include:
- Muscular Strength – the ability to perform one maximal effort
- Muscular Endurance – the ability to perform a movement task over an extended period
- Circular-Respiratory Endurance – the ability of the heart, lungs and vascular system to function at a high rate for an extended period
- Flexibility – the range of motion at the various joints of the body
Motor Fitness – This refers to one’s performance abilities as influenced by the factors:
- Coordination – the rhythmical integration of motor and sensory systems into a harmonious working together of all parts of the body
- Speed – the ability to move from one point to another in the shortest time possible over a short distance
- Agility – the ability to move from point to point as rapidly as possible while making successive movements in different directions
- Power – the ability to perform one maximal explosive force
- Balance – means the ability to maintain one’s own equilibrium in relationship to the force of gravity in both static and dynamic movement situations.