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Cooperation with Hula Hoops and Build N'Balance®

By physiotherapist Hannah Harboe

What is cooperation? Cooperation is all about finding a solution, the purpose of which is to make it easier for the participants in the cooperation to achieve a common goal. For a child, cooperation entails that he or she thinks about their own needs and compares these with those of others.

Today, children and adolescents generally spend much of their days passively seated at their computer or tablet or watching TV. This means that young people have inadequate incentive to develop social competences, including the ability to cooperate. Interacting and functioning in social contexts are important skills, high standards of which, from an early age, children are expected to maintain in social situations. Children have to master the art of cooperation at kindergarten and subsequently use this at school, in education, at work and in their leisure time. Good cooperation creates synergetic effects, strong relationships and empathy between children, and these are crucial to their developing self-confidence and cognitive skills.

Why is it important that children learn to cooperate?
An ability to cooperate is possibly the one most important thing we can teach our children.

How do we encourage children to cooperate through play and motor activities?
Cooperation is a skill that children must learn, practise and develop. Play and motor activities are effective when used as tools to develop cooperation. Motor activities is a sphere in which the dynamics, the children’s interpersonal relationships and their ability to work together are all instrumental to creating the foundation.
For an activity to get off the ground and develop, the participants have to engage in some kind of negotiation. For example, when one child puts forward an idea for a game, the other children respond by either accepting or rejecting the idea or putting forward alternatives based on the initial idea for play.

 

 

 

Adults can support the children‘s opportunities to play:

  • By helping the children to decide what they can play and providing a framework for their game.
  • By bolstering the children’s play competencies, i.e. their ability to enter a game, negotiate about the game and put forward ideas for developing it.

By providing motor skills equipment, we adults stimulate children‘s ability to cooperate. Play requisites very naturally create a dialogue between children as to what they can be used for.
 

CASE

A kindergarten leader wrote to us and explained that in a large group, the children tended to be “every man for himself”, and there were frequent conflicts in the cloakroom. She asked if it was possible to combine motor skills and movement in an attempt to teach the children to cooperate and help each other better. In no time, we came up with the obvious choice, i.e. the “Move to a new island” game using Gonge Hula Hoops or Build N’Balance®. In this game, the children have to work together to ensure that as many children as possible remain in the game for as long as possible, without any of them falling off.

Rules of the game (basic level)
The adult spreads Gonge Hula Hoops across the floor. Each hoop is an island. There should be one less hoop than there are children. Ask the children to hop from one island to the next and tell them to work together to ensure that as many as possible survive. During the game, when the adult shouts ‘Move’, the children have to jump to a new island. When the children have tried this a couple of times, the adult removes one hoop. As there are gradually fewer and fewer hoops, the challenges increase, as the children have to share the space inside the hoops.

Developments (advanced level)
The adult sets up Build N’ Balance® elements in a circle. The children stand on the trail. Set the children off walking along the trail. The adult removes one element at a time so the trail gradually becomes smaller. Now the children have to work together to keep as many children as possible on the shorter trail.

Important notes
Some children find it difficult to judge space and direction. If this is the case, start by laying only the planks on the floor. Practise the game and introduce either the yellow or red tops. As you gradually increase the height of the trail, you effectively adapt the game to the children’s functional capacity. Alternatively, you could use Gonge River and Riverlandscape elements.
We repeated the activity over a number of weeks.The first time, we found that the children fended for themselves. They jumped from one island to the next without paying attention to each other. They jumped, pushed each other off or landed on the one island at the same time, which meant that both children were eliminated. They tended to stand with their backs to each other and push against each other for fear of being knocked out of the game.
After a couple of games, we noticed that the children had made significant progress. Now they talked about how they would jump and if a child wobbled on landing, the other children would reach out to stabilise their buddy. They no longer stood back to back, but facing each other inside the Hula Hoops and were therefore able to read each others’ signals, and speak to and hold onto each other. In the end, they succeeded in cooperating so that there was space enough for them all.