Coaching Pre-Schoolers

This is my third year coaching classes with all pre-schoolers in a class. I had experience coaching pre-schoolers but they trained together with other primary school children. Coaching a class with entire pre-schoolers is a totally different experience.

Pre-schoolers are the one in the age-category of between 3 to 6 years old. They either already begin to attend a child care centre or kindergarten or just stay home. This is the most challenging age-group to coach as they have a limited vocabulary and tend to be afraid around strangers. At times you might get those who are overly active and also there are those who are very quiet. Those overly-active ones will be everywhere while the quiet ones do not talk to you, hence you won't know what they want.

One way to breakthrough to them is to get them be comfortable with you. You have to speak their language meaning on the topics that they can relate to like cartoons' character etc. Once they are comfortable with you, then it is easier to to communicate.

They have to know that they are here to learn something and not just to play. They have to understand that they are in a class with their peers and there's a coach there to teach them.

The expectation out of these children are not too much on the physical skills but more towards their soft-skillls or character building skills such as discipline, respect, confidence, humility and also leadership. This is not to say that there are no physical skills are being taught to them, there are actually a lot of physical trainnig for them. Taekwondo techniques will of course be taught but the approach is different.

Coaching of taekwondo will only covers the basic hand and leg techniques such as punches, blocks and three basic kicks. The demand toward them is to be able to perform thee basic techniques. In order for them to undertand better in the skills, provide them with a target to hit as they have yet to fully developed their imagery and visualisation skills they will execute their techniques all over the places. With the target, they can see where they are hitting.

The focus of the class will be towards game-like aspect as children being children, they like to play and we allowed them to play with guidance and limited rules This will inculcate displine and respect of rules. The games that they play will indirectly help them to develop their athleticism, coordination, flexibility and other physical attributes. The games also will also have specificity with taekwondo skills.

Over the three years (and counting) that I have been coaching this age-group, I totally enjoy every single minute of it with their antics and progress and eventually their change in character to be better as they mature. It is totally a rewarding experience for me. This give me even more motivation to continue to work with them.