Tips for practising bat and ball skills with children
NOTE - This post was originally written for our 'weekly warble' segment in a few Facebook groups for the community local to our gym.
Welcome to the weekly warble here at Ideanthro Movement!
This week I'm going to give you ideas about how to practice bat and ball skills with children. It's nicely complimented by the accompanying video.
The reason that I'm inspired to warble about this topic this week is that here at Ideanthro Movement we work with a lot of children who aren't as resilient to perceived failure as they might otherwise be. That means that if they attempt to learn a new skill and don't feel like they're succeeding quickly they can become quite upset and refuse to continue to practice that skill. Hence it's really important that we introduce these skills in a non-confrontational manner. As it happens I've had a number of very successful such sessions recently and so it's fresh in my mind.
Let's dig in!
Let's first take a look at how bat and ball skills are often taught. One common scenario is for parent and child to head outside with a bat and a ball. The parent throws the ball to the child who tries to hit it. They then fetch the ball and try again. Now that's a sound approach that's tried and tested over a long time, but it can present a few challenges.
One challenge presented by that method is that when you start out using a bat, you're somewhat limited to hitting the ball the way the bat was intended to be used. For example, a cricket bat works best when swung like a cricket bat. However that doesn't mean that a typical cricket bat technique is the best way to hit a ball when first starting out.
As it turns out, the easiest way to hit a ball when starting out is usually to hold the "bat" (I'll come back to good "bats" to start with in a moment) vertically pointed up and then to swing forwards and down as the ball is thrown at the bat. Unfortunately, cricket bats (and other such implements) are unwieldy when swung like that, so we need another implement. And that brings us to pool noodles.
In our gym we typically teach bat and ball skills with a pool noodle because it's light enough to be swung easily in all sorts of directions. This allows children to start out holding it vertically. We then throw the ball right at the pool noodle, they swing (thus practicing their timing) and likely get a hit. They get a sense of achievement to begin with and we can then over time progress to more challenging swings etc.
Now of course that might not be necessary for all children, but if the child in question isn't as resilient to perceived failure as others might be, then by starting really simple with the pool noodle they'll get a few quick wins and be more likely to persist as the challenge gets more difficult.
There are other things we do when teaching bat and ball skills to make the experience as enjoyable as possible and some of those are covered in the accompanying video, but I'll leave the written warble here for now lest it becomes too much of a lengthy manuscript.
I hope that you found that useful. Have a good one!
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