Perceptual Motor Development | Connecting the Brain & the Body
I had no idea there was such a thing as Perceptual Motor Development! I found this subject really interesting.
Perceptual Motor Skills refer to a child’s developing ability to interact with their environment by combining the use of their senses and motor skills. This can be visual, auditory, and tactile sensory abilities combined with emerging motor skills to develop perceptual motor skills.
Perceptual Motor Skills also refers to the process of taking in, organizing, and interpreting sensory information, while motor skills (as we discussed last week) refers to the ability to control the body’s movements including the movement of the eyes. Gross motor skills (as discussed last week) include the movement of large limbs or the whole body. Fine motor skills are developed with the use of the fingers to grasp and manipulate objects (as discussed earlier this week).
Perceptual Motor Skills
Perceptual motor skills include body awareness, spatial awareness, directional awareness, and temporal awareness. Body awareness involves being able to locate body parts and understand the function of them. Spatial awareness is being aware of the space occupied by the body and how to position and manoeuvre in it. Differentiating between left and right, front and back, top or bottom, and up and down involve directional awareness. Temporal awareness is the ability to understand the concept of time passing, the sequence of events, and the prediction of how soon moving objects arrive.
Our Busy Books are a fantastic tool to help with all the stages of motor development. Movement of eyes, arms, hands, the body and of cause fingers as the pick up and move the cut outs onto the activities stimulate all the right senses.
Personally, my husband and I noticed a big developmental leap in our children motor skills once they started playing with their Busy Books. This is one of the main reasons we decided to start up Busy Books Australia, to help share this amazing progression we saw in our children.
We hope you too will see such big gains in your little ones with our Busy Books also.