Sport Waitākere - FunSkills

FUNSkills will help you to teach your tamariki the fundamental movement skills they need in order to develop agility, coordination, and confidence to use their bodies to take risks and meet physical challenges. Fundamental movement primes the brain for learning, fostering the neural pathways that form the foundations for cognitive (hinengaro), physical (tinana), emotional (whatumanawa) and spiritual (wairua) learning.

FUNSKILLS!

FUNSkills aims to improve the physical literacy of our tamariki by providing fun activities that will build motor skills alongside critical thinking skills and help to build relationships with others. A person’s physical literacy is a combination of their motivation, confidence and competence to be active, along with their knowledge and understanding of how being active contributes to their life (Sport NZ).

Our physical literacy journey begins at birth and it is important that the experiences that we have during our younger years are quality experiences that are rewarding, challenging, focus on having fun and building a wide range of skills that will support our holistic development.

FUNSkills will assist teachers to provide these FUN activities that will support the development of physical literacy in young children.

FUNSkills is aimed for the junior primary years and includes:

FUNSkills – The “Why” professional development workshop for teachers
FUNSkills practical workshop that introduces the resource cards
Ongoing support and teacher mentoring by the FUNSkills Coordinator
30 resource cards to use with Tamariki

Benefits for Children

● Through FUNSkills children are developing their physical literacy. This is about building confidence, competence, motivation, knowledge and understanding for children to remain active for life.

● Teachers comment that they notice that children develop turn-taking skills, listening skills, have improved ability to follow instructions, increased confidence, and are more able to settle to classroom tasks following a FUNSkills session.

● Students replicated the games and activities in their interval thus ensuring that they had more opportunities for practise.

Benefits for Teachers

● Builds teachers confidence to provide quality movement experiences for children that develop children holistically.

● Once teachers have an understanding of the “why” movement helps overall development they are more able to recognise the needs of children and plan accordingly to help those students develop their skills.

● Teachers can now recognise the skills that are lacking in children and how this affects their classroom learning

● Makes Physical Education easy! They don’t have to know the rules of the games!

● Teachers are able to link the PE curriculum with other curriculum areas rather than have it as a stand alone

● It was a FUN way of doing physical activity and all children were engaged.