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About Health, Safety and Motor Skills Development
The learning area, Health, Safety and Motor Skills Development, helps children develop habits towards a healthy lifestyle.
Last updated 29 May 2025
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Health, Safety and Motor Skills Development (HSM)
As an early childhood educator, you play an important role in developing children’s health and safety awareness and motor skills:
To support the development of these skills, you can refer to the Movement Framework on the four movement concepts to plan and organise activities. It is important to structure activities from simple to more challenging to accommodate children's readiness and individual needs.
What are the benefits?
The early years play a crucial role in shaping children's lifelong habits and well-being. Here's how a focus on health, safety awareness, and motor skills development can benefit children:
Promoting Healthy Habits: Introducing and adopting healthy lifestyle habits, such as personal hygiene, regular exercise, healthy eating, good sleep habits, and balanced screen time, lay the foundation for children to embrace healthy habits, leading to active and healthy lifestyles in their youth and adulthood.
Developing Safety Awareness: Meaningful learning activities help children understand various safety aspects, including road, fire, stranger, and body safety, enabling them to recognise potential dangers and seek help when needed.
Motor Skills Development: Intentionally planning fun activities supports the development of both gross motor skills (e.g., walking, bending, throwing, and catching a ball) and fine motor skills (e.g., using scissors, fastening buttons), fostering children's confidence in controlling and coordinating their bodies.
Learning goals and knowledge, skills and dispositions (KSDs) in HSM
Refer to the Educators’ Guide for Health, Safety and Motor Skills Development for more information.
Learning Goal 1: Develop healthy habits and safety awareness at home, in school and at public places
Knowledge, Skills and Dispositions (KSD): |
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1.1 Develop an awareness of the importance of keeping themselves healthy, clean and safe |
Learning Goal 2: Enjoy participating in a variety of physical activities
Knowledge, Skills and Dispositions (KSD): |
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2.1 Develop an interest in doing a variety of indoor and outdoor physical activities |
Learning Goal 3: Demonstrate control, coordination and balance in gross motor activities
Knowledge, Skills and Dispositions (KSD): |
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3.1 Develop body awareness (i.e., what the body does) |
Learning Goal 4: Demonstrate control and coordination in fine motor activities
Knowledge, Skills and Dispositions (KSD): |
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4.1 Manipulate tools and objects with dexterity |
How can you do it?
Organising the learning environment
Monitoring and assessing children's learning and development
You play a crucial role in monitoring and assessing children's learning and development in health, safety, and motor skills. Given that children develop at different rates, observing and documenting their learning and motor skills development is an ongoing process. Do:
Make short notes, use children’s work, take photographs or record videos to capture their learning experiences
Analyse the information gathered to track their progress and readiness for the next level of development
Here are some questions you can consider when monitoring and assessing children’s development in health, safety and motor skills.
Resources
Educators’ Guide for Health, Safety and Motor Skills Development
Explore printables for Health Safety and Motor Development in the resource page.