Early Years: Movement, Executive Function and Classroom Readiness

Ask most early years practitioners what classroom readiness looks like and you will get a consistent answer: a child who can sit, listen, follow an instruction, take turns, and sustain effort on a task for long enough to learn from it. What you will hear less often is any account of how those capacities develop — what a three or four-year-old needs to do, repeatedly and in the right conditions, to arrive at the point where they can reliably do those things.

The answer, consistently supported by research, is move. Executive function — the cognitive system that underpins attention, inhibition, working memory, and flexible thinking — develops through active, embodied experience in early childhood. Not through sitting and practising readiness, but through the kinds of movement, play, and structured physical engagement that build the neurological foundations from which readiness eventually emerges. This article is written for early years practitioners who want to understand that evidence and use it — with session templates, measurement tools, and the rationale behind every design choice.

Why executive function is the key variable

Classroom readiness is not a single skill. It is a cluster of capacities — attention, self-regulation, persistence, cooperation, language comprehension — that share a common underlying system: executive function. Working memory holds instructions long enough to act on them. Inhibitory control stops an impulsive response long enough for a considered one. Cognitive flexibility allows a child to shift from one task or rule to another without becoming destabilised. These are the capacities that determine whether a child can function as a learner in a classroom environment, and they are all executive functions.

They are also capacities that respond directly to how early years settings are designed. A 2024 meta-analysis in Sports Medicine found that physical activity in early childhood produces measurable positive effects on cognitive performance, with effects on executive function among the most consistent.² Research by Pontifex and colleagues (2025) confirms that cognitively engaging physical activity — movement that makes explicit executive function demands — produces stronger EF effects than purely aerobic activity.³ And a 2022 cluster randomised controlled trial by Bai and colleagues specifically examining preschool children found significant improvements in executive function and motor skills following group-based physically active play programmes.⁵

The early years setting is where these foundations are built or not built. What happens in a three-to-six year-old's movement environment shapes the cognitive architecture that will either support or constrain their learning for years afterwards.

"Executive function develops through active, embodied experience — not through sitting and practising readiness, but through the movement and play that build the neurological foundations readiness requires."

Annarie Boor

The mechanisms: why movement builds the readiness to learn

Movement as a readiness tool, not a reward

Short bouts of movement modulate physiological arousal in ways that directly affect a child's capacity to engage with structured learning. Systematic reviews of classroom movement breaks — including Daly-Smith and colleagues' frequently cited analysis in BMJ Open Sport and Exercise Medicine — report reliable improvements in on-task behaviour when movement sessions are routine and timed to transition points.¹ The key word is routine: predictable movement provision reduces anticipatory anxiety in young children and allows them to sustain engagement in the preceding structured period because they know release is coming. Movement breaks that are reactive — offered when dysregulation has already occurred — are substantially less effective than those built into the session as a designed feature.

The regulation warm-up at the start of a session is doing something specific: it uses proprioceptive input (graded pressure, cross-lateral patterns, body awareness) to downshift arousal from whatever state a child has arrived in — after a rushed morning, after a playground altercation, after a sensory-loaded transition — toward the calm-alert state in which learning is possible. Without it, the first ten minutes of a structured session is often spent waiting for children to arrive neurologically, even when they have already arrived physically.

Games that practise the cognitive skills directly

The specific design choice that separates effective EF-building movement programmes from general physical play is cognitive load. Stop/go games require inhibitory control: the child must override an established response pattern when the signal changes. Mirror-copying tasks require sustained joint attention and working memory: the child holds the partner's movement in mind and reproduces it while tracking ongoing changes. Rule-switching games require cognitive flexibility: the rule changes mid-activity and the child must update their behaviour in real time without losing the thread.

Meta-analytic evidence supports this distinction clearly. Mao and colleagues (2024), examining cognitively engaging physical activity and executive function in young children, found that EF-demanding movement tasks produce significantly stronger effects on inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility than equivalent duration of aerobic activity without cognitive demands.⁴ The movement is not the active ingredient in isolation. The cognitive engagement is. This is why game design matters, and why a well-designed EF movement session is different in kind from unstructured outdoor play — valuable as that is for other reasons.

Moving with meaning deepens understanding

Pairing movement with story prompts, action sequences, and explicit vocabulary creates what the embodied cognition literature calls an embodied memory trace: the information is encoded simultaneously across verbal, motor, spatial, and emotional systems. Retrieval is supported by multiple pathways. For children who are still developing verbal language, or for whom verbal encoding is not the dominant channel, this multi-pathway approach can be transformative — not as a workaround, but as a more complete form of encoding than language alone provides.

The practical implication for early years practice is that teachers should echo the session's movement vocabulary in subsequent classroom activities. The vocabulary used in the movement story, the sequence names, the game rules — when these reappear in structured learning, they activate the embodied memory trace and amplify transfer. This is a low-cost strategy that requires only consistency of language between the movement session and what follows it.

Session architecture and templates

The four-part session structure is consistent across all three time variants. The phases are sequenced deliberately: regulation before cognitive demand, cognitive demand before creative expression, creative expression before the return-to-learn bridge. None of the phases is interchangeable with another, and omitting the return-to-learn bridge — the most commonly skipped element in practice — removes the mechanism by which the session's gains transfer into the classroom learning that follows.

Measuring what changes

Measurement in early years movement programmes serves two purposes: it tells you whether the programme is producing the changes it is designed to produce, and it provides reviewable evidence for leaders, parents, and external review. Both are best served by measures that are embedded in normal session delivery and aligned with the outcome domains that early years assessments are already tracking. The tools below are designed to be completed by a single practitioner within the session itself — no specialist equipment, no separate observation time.

Baseline a week before starting, then sample weekly for six to eight weeks. Two sessions per week is the minimum for detectable trends. Aggregate scores across the group to identify programme-level effects; track individual learners separately where IEP or development plan evidence is required.

Momentary time sampling — pre and post session

In-session game scoring — completed during play

Implementation guidance

The most common implementation failure in movement programmes is inconsistency. The return-to-learn bridge is skipped when time runs short. The rule changes are not introduced because the game seems to be going well. The session is moved or cancelled because something else has taken priority. These are not minor variations — they are the decisions that determine whether the programme produces the effects the evidence predicts.

A short CPD input — thirty to sixty minutes — before beginning the programme significantly improves fidelity and sustainability. Practitioners who understand the mechanism behind each design choice are more likely to protect the elements that matter and more confident adapting the ones that do not. The session templates are starting points, not scripts; practitioners who understand why each phase exists can adjust what happens within it without losing what it is for.

"Practitioners who understand why each phase exists can adapt what happens within it — without losing what it is for."

Annarie Boor