Pocket reference

Physical literacy Week 1

Motivation, confidence, competence, knowledge, and understanding to value and take responsibility for physical activity for life.

Self-determination Week 6

People stay when autonomy, competence, and relatedness are fed. Control grows compliance; choice grows a mover.

Mastery climate Week 6

A room that asks 'your next step' instead of 'who won.' Task, authority, recognition, grouping, evaluation, time (TARGET).

Psychomotor Week 1

The movement domain — coordinating, sensing, and physically doing.

Affective Week 1

The feeling and relating domain — confidence, belonging, joy, fear.

Scope of practice Week 1

The legal and ethical boundary of what you may do. Observe and refer; do not diagnose unless licensed.

Cephalocaudal Week 2

Development from head toward tail — head control before sitting, sitting before walking.

Proximodistal Week 2

Development from the center of the body outward — shoulder control before finger control.

Fundamental movement skills Week 2

The basic movement vocabulary: locomotor, stability, and manipulative patterns that underlie later sport and play.

Dynamical systems Week 2

Movement emerges in the moment from the child, the task, and the environment — not from a stored program.

Proficiency barrier Week 2

Seefeldt: without reliable fundamental skills, later sport and play stay closed. Not laziness — a developmental wall.

Hourglass model Week 2

Gallahue's phases: reflexive → rudimentary → fundamental → specialized. Sand has to pass the neck of the glass.

Constraints Week 3

Individual, task, and environmental factors that shape (limit or invite) a movement.

Cognitive stage Week 3

Beginner stage of learning: many errors, high attention, needs demonstration and simple cues.

Associative stage Week 3

Intermediate stage: fewer errors, refining the pattern, ready for variability and specific feedback.

Autonomous stage Week 3

Advanced stage: the skill is automatic enough to free attention for strategy or the environment.

Knowledge of results (KR) Week 3

Feedback about the outcome — 'you hit the target.'

Knowledge of performance (KP) Week 3

Feedback about the movement itself — 'you stepped with the other foot.'

Skill theme Week 4

A family of related movements used to organize a curriculum: stability, locomotor, or manipulative.

Movement concept Week 4

The adverb of movement — space, effort, relationships — that adds variety to a skill theme.

Cue Week 4

A short, often image-based instruction a child can use while moving.

Tactile Week 5

The sense of touch — texture, temperature, pressure.

Vestibular Week 5

The inner-ear sense of head position, movement, and gravity.

Proprioception Week 5

The muscle-and-joint sense of where the body is in space.

Sensory seeker Week 5

Under-responsive pattern: the child hunts more input (crashing, spinning, touching).

Sensory avoider Week 5

Over-responsive pattern: the child withdraws from input that feels like too much.

Dyspraxia Week 5

Difficulty conceiving, planning, or executing a new movement (praxis).

Strength-based practice Week 6

Using a child's existing strengths and past successes as the material of change.

Trauma-informed Week 6

Designing for safety, predictability, choice, and consent because nervous systems remember.

State of play Week 7

Absorbed, joyful, apparently purposeless activity that suspends self-consciousness and time.

Play deprivation Week 7

Chronic lack of play opportunities, linked to poorer regulation, social skill, and physical competence.

Dynamic assessment Week 8

Testing the limits with support — 'can you do it with a cue, a demo, a hand?'

Objective language Week 8

What you saw, counted, and timed — not what you judged.

FITT Week 9

Frequency, intensity, time, type — the dose of a movement program.

Progression / regression Week 9

Making a task harder or easier without abandoning the goal.

Universal Design for Learning Week 10

Designing multiple ways to engage, understand, and participate from the start — not as an afterthought.

Red flag Week 10

A sign that warrants a family conversation and possible professional evaluation — not a diagnosis.

Family-centered practice Week 11

Treating families as experts on their child and as the primary influence on development.

Risky play Week 11

Age-appropriate play with uncertainty — climbing, rough-and-tumble, exploring — that teaches judgment.