The Little Gym philosophy in action

The Little Gym philosophy is to allow children to participate in an activity or try a skill when they're ready.  Just last night we had a breakthrough with one child that I thought I'd write about.  But first a little bit about our philosophy...

We start when they're in our parent/child classes.  Several times each semester, we talk about how parents should look at a child's face when they're doing skills with them.  If a child is showing that they're fearful, we recommend backing off and giving them praise for what they did allow you to do with them.  We don't recommend forcing them through the skill just to have them  do it.

In our Preschool/Kindergarten age classes, we let children know that if they don't want to try an activity, they can just sit by the "watching wall" and watch.  Eventually children will learn the procedure and often they'll go directly to the watching wall and tell us, "Teacher Ron, I'm just going to watch today."  Usually when we get into small groups for the station portion of class, they'll join in.  The group activities at the beginning of the class can be the most intimidating and it can take weeks or months until they're ready to join in. 

If children don't want to go into class by themselves, we allow parents to sit by the watching wall to provide support. We ask parents to be as silent as possible and allow the teachers to interact with their children and invite them to join in "when they're ready," or "when they change their mind."  When parents whisper in their ear, "Doesn't that look like fun?" or encourage them to participate in the activity, it ususally backfires.  Children join in when they're comfortable. And the best way to make a child comfortable is to allow them to watch the activity for a while, and join in when they're ready.  And it could be the next week, or in several weeks.

For our grade school classes, we will see some children who don't like to do specific skills.  Some children are terrified of doing somersaults.  Some are afraid of doing a forward or backward rotation on the bars. And some are scared of the high beam.  For these children, our goal is to break down the skill into simpler variations that they would be comfortable doing, such as doing just the beginning of the skill, or doing it with a very "heavy spot" or possibly with two instructors spotting. 

We have one such child in one of our evening grade school classes.  The almost-seven-year-old is a bit frightened of the bars and has refused to do backward rotations (pull-overs) or forward rotations (tummy rolls) on the bars.  Her dad had expressed concern, thinking that his daughter might even be slowing up the class.  We talked about giving her daughter the room to try these skills when she was ready, making sure that she didn't feel pressure from her parents to do the skills even though she didn't want to.   Last night she decided the she was ready. She did a tummy roll on the low bar with the help of two instructors.  After doing it, she said that it wasn't so bad.  She, the instructors, and her dad, all felt a surge of pride.  This is what we aim for in every class every week. 

This morning when I came in to work, Teacher Angela was excited to tell me about this breakthrough, and I'm excited to share it with you too!  
 -Ron