Congratulations to a former Hopscotch child for his Pompey FC debut!

Hopscotch would like to congratulate one of our first children at our  Gosport nursery, Harry Jewitt-White, on his full league debut with Portsmouth FC. We were delighted and immensely proud to see him have his moment as he took to midfield on Saturday after many years of hard work and commitment to his football career. 

Harry started playing football at Pompey in the Community at St Vincent's College with many of his pre school friends and we are still lucky to work alongside his very proud Mum, Claire who was part of the opening team at our Gosport nursery and now runs our support offices in Fareham. To all those parents standing pitch side on the weekends, look what can be achieved #dreamsdocometrue.
 
The development of gross motor skills in the early years is paramount to assisting our children with their learning and development, which is why it is a prime area of learning in the Early Years Foundation Stage. It has been proven that physical movement helps influence cognitive skills, memory and attention and that children require the opportunity to move, explore and navigate, to become familiar with their environment and grow physically strong and confident in their actions. By providing opportunities which encourages physical development ultimately leads them into an active, healthy and happy lifestyle.
 
You will find our children at Hopscotch engaging in a variety of activities that help develop their core strength, agility, coordination and ultimately help them to have control over their bodies. These activities look different across our age ranges. Our littlest ones will have opportunities to be involved in Tummy Time as well as actively crawling and engaging in active play, whilst in our Toddler and Pre-School rooms you will see opportunities around balance, climbing, jumping, running and similar.
 
One of our children’s favourite and most popular way of developing their physical gross motor skills often revolve around ball games. With these games often assisting with team work, coordination and listening attention skills also. As part of our curriculum we offer children the opportunity to spend time with physical education specialist Ashley Barker who comes into our settings inspiring and leading the pre school age children on a weekly basis, he is so much fun we want to join in!  He is currently supporting our Botley nursery after spending sometime in our Fareham and Gosport nurseries and will be coming to the other nurseries soon.