By: Integrated Learning Strategies
Physical Crawling boosts gross and fine motor skills (large and refined movements), balance, hand-eye-coordination and overall strength. The development and refinement of these skills will assist your child later in life with activities such as running, jumping, writing, fastening clothes, and throwing balls.
Spatial As a child crawls, they discover distance and placement of objects. They also learn how to route themselves around obstacles that cannot be scaled or crawled through. So they create a new path and voila they have just developed and implemented basic problem-solving skills.
Visual Examining a distant object and then refocusing on their hands in order to reach that object forces their eyes to adjust to the varying distances. Discovering distance and placement of objects also assists with a child's vision. This development helps with later skills such as catching, driving or copying words off a board.