None listed
Conditions
Brief summary
Early Childhood Education aims to achieve motor, cognitive, emotional, and social development of preschoolers by providing them with a variety of learning opportunities. The Square Stepping Exercise (SSE) is a balance and lower limb strength training programme used to prevent falls and stimulate cognitive function in older adults. This project aims to propose a SSE tele-exercise (Tele-SSE) protocol to evaluate its effects on motor and cognitive development of children between 3 and 6 years. A randomized controlled trial with experimental (Tele-SSE) and control (usual education) groups will be carried out. The application of Tele-SSE will be performed for 9 months (three times per week) and one additional follow-up after the intervention at the beginning of the next academic year. One-hundred and two preschoolers will be recruited and randomly distributed into the two groups: experimental (n = 51) and control (n = 51). Although the main outcome will be balance due to the nature of the SSE, outcomes will include physical and motor (body mass index, waist circumference, handgrip and lower-limb strength, speed-agility, and cardiorespiratory fit-ness) and cognitive (executive functions and attention, episodic memory, and language assessment, using the FITness Assessment in Preschool Battery (PREFIT) and The National Institutes of Health Toolbox Early Childhood Cognition Battery. This project aims to improve cognitive and motor skills in preschoolers aged between 3 and 6 years old based on a 9-month Tele-SSE intervention. If this intervention proves to be effective, it could be implemented in those centres, entities and associations specialized in early childhood education.
Interventions
Experimental group will receive Tele-Square Step Exercise training (Tele-SSE), 3 times per week and for 9 months. Each training session will have a duration close to 60 minutes and will be supervised by a sports physical educator. The intervention will be applied in groups of no more than 25. At the beginning of the intervention, the instructor will explain the training guidelines. All sessions will be followed by video-conference through the digital whiteboard placed in every early childhood ed
Experimental group will receive Tele-Square Step Exercise training (Tele-SSE), 3 times per week and for 9 months. Each training session will have a duration close to 60 minutes and will be supervised by a sports physical educator. The intervention will be applied in groups of no more than 25. At the beginning of the intervention, the instructor will explain the training guidelines. All sessions will be followed by video-conference through the digital whiteboard placed in every early childhood education classroom. The Tele-SSE will be performed on a fine carpet of 200 x 80 cm, divided into 40 squares of 20 x 20 cm, adapted to participants' morphological characteristics. Participants will execute the SSE exercise divided in two tapestries simultaneously. SSE includes a total of 200 different movement patterns which are classified, according to their difficulty, into three general levels: beginner, intermediate and advanced. There will be a progression in the levels in the proposed intervention. The beginner level has two sub-levels, while the intermediate and advanced levels have 3 sub-levels. The proposed intervention will include a progression along the first six levels until the advanced level 1. The greater levels will be combined with other patterns that include colours or flexible surfaces that make the task even more difficult and encourage cooperative work among participants. Likewise, participants will start with simple two-step movement patterns and, step by step, they will perform more complex patterns that will require greater number of steps per sequence, multidirectional movements and even the performance of other motor skills, such as jumping with feet together, jumping on one leg, etc. The difficulty of the stepping pattern will be increased one per month, considering the levels previously indicated. A checklist will be used by the study personnel in order to control the participants' adherence to the intervention.
Sponsors
Universidad de Extremadura
Study design
Allocation
Randomised controlled trial
Intervention model
Parallel
Primary purpose
Treatment
Masking
Blinded (masking used) (Investigator, Outcomes Assessor)
Eligibility
Sex/Gender
All
Age
3 Years to 6 Years
Healthy volunteers
Yes
Inclusion criteria
a) children aged between 3 and 6 years old; b) To be enrolled in a public early childhood education centre in the autonomous community of Extremadura; c) to complete and sign the informed consent form by their parents or legal guardians; d) children's consent and voluntariness to participate in the intervention
Exclusion criteria
Suffer some condition or inconvenience that prevent the normal practice of physical activity.
Outcome results
None listed