Helping children to improve their balance
Welcome to the weekly warble here at Ideanthro Movement!
I'm going to keep this week's warble brief, with a tip about helping kids to learn to improve their balance.
But first I'd just like to mention that we have just a couple of vacancies in our fitness program for children living with autism.
These are pretty rare, so if you or someone you know is interested then get in touch and we'll help you out.
Now, back to balance and children.
One of the challenges when helping children to learn to balance better is getting them to slow down. If I place a balance beam on the ground and ask 10 children to balance and walk along it, some will move slowly, but the majority will move quite fast. The problem here is that the majority (but in fairness, not all) of improvements in balance come from practising while moving slowly.
So what's a good way to get children to slow down while balancing?
One good way is to raise the balance beam a small distance off the ground. 30cm is often plenty. Not enough to present any major danger or to intimidate them, but enough to draw their focus to the task. When we do that most children slow down, and thus the practice they put in is much more valuable.
This doesn't work every time, so there are other strategies that we use, but it's a good one, and one that you can think about for your own children.
Happy balancing!