WeeMove with BrightPath

11/07/2016

I recently had to go through the process of interviewing child care options and deciding where my children would be going while I go back to work. Among one of my first questions to every provider was what activities they do during the day, and how often they go outside and engage in active physical activity. Physical activity is so important to me for my family: active children are happy children in my mind! This movement and activity is not only important for their health and well-being, it also improves cognitive skills, academic performance and mental well-being. BrightPath recognizes this importance and has developed an amazing program based around it!

WeeMove is a new program that BrightPath has brought in for children ages 3-6 in all of their centres starting this past September. This program was developed to focus on main skills like locomotor skills (walking, crawling, shuffling, galloping, hopping, etc), manipulative skills, hand eye coordination, and balance. Throughout the program the educators go through a rotation of differing skills and the increase the difficulty with each rotation so that the children continue to be challenged and grow their skills. Through these activities they will also work on skills like place words, shape/number/letter recognition and the child’s attention is maintained through obstacle course style activities. These movement skills that they will learn are transferrable into the children learning to read their environment, making appropriate decisions and being more confident and controlled in various physical activities long-term. The WeeMove program is designed to follow the curriculum requirements for pre-school to kinder aged children and to reach physical developmental milestones. The program is implemented twice per day, four days per week for a minimum of 1-15 minutes and is set to music and done outdoors whenever possible. Everything about this program is designed to make learning fun, instill a love of movement and fully engage the children in every activity.

A program like this is invaluable for children and it makes me really excited to see something like this being implemented in a local child care center. In a world where it seems like physical activity in school continues to be downgraded in importance, it is refreshing to see BrightPath highlight this area so well in their program for the children. There are so many factors that go into choosing where your children will go to day care and it is never an easy decision for us parents, but this program would definitely be a huge checkmark on my list!

If you are interested in learning more about the WeeMove program, or any other information in regards to your local BrightPath, click here to visit their website.