Howdy, this was a cool experience for me, and I figured you guys might wanna hear about it.
I counseled for the first time this year at our local church camp, Peniel Bible Camp, (the age group was 5th/6th graders)
(Here's the camp's site if anyone cares.
http://www.obf.net/~peniel/ )
and I was given the job of teaching the 1 hour archery class each day. The camp had a few old Bear youth recurves that drew at about 10-15ish#, and some fiberglass arrows.
I taught them the basics (I tried to teach them how to shoot recurves close to the way Fred Asbell teaches in his Instinctive Shooting books) like how to hold the string, how to hold the bow, where to bring your finger to when you draw and such, and then just let them shoot for the rest of the class (that's what they're all there to do anyways). Once the kids got used to shooting the way I showed them, and stopped gorilla gripping it (holding the string with their fist), they did pretty well for the equipment they had, and more importantly they seemed to be having a lot of fun with the bows.
Since so many in the class seemed to be enjoying the archery, I decided to open a second "come and go as you please" class that lasted 2 hours during the official swimming time. To my surprise I had even more kids in the 2 hour class than I did in the original class, and about 5 of them stayed the full 2 hours. About half of the class mentioned they wanted to get a recurve or a longbow of their own for Christmas or their birthday now, and one even showed a lot of interest in wanting to go bow hunting. I told the kids about Tradgang, and said if they had any bow oriented questions, this was a great place to ask them.
Fun week - I hope I get a chance to go back next year. :D
Topic: Got a chance to teach a youth archery class (Read 445 times)
