Primary School Gymnastics

Hello there. I am a high school student and I'm coaching a group of girls in primary schools interested in participating in a gymnastics competition later this year. There are about 30 or so girls aged 7-11. We coach of an afternoon for 2 hours which is purely gymnastics skills. We have a lunch hour a week (so far) set aside for Fitness as many of our girls are, unfortunately, not in great shape. I also want to integrate the force in classes noon. We have about 40 minutes for lunch. There will never be 2 trainers physical training per week, 6 we have is simply too many. We start with some relay races, but we usually have no idea what to do and eventually let them go early. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas that would help. I want to please, but at the same time they need to improve. We have not yet selected the teams, but we will do that in a month or two.
Another thing is that it becomes very difficult to control, they become very excited to be translated by coaches screaming or having to bribe them with all pacifiers. Does anyone have ideas that do not discipline too harsh?
Thank you all for your help!

I am a nationally certified coach in gymnastics, and I teach children from 3 years to 15 years. It's my job, I'm there almost every day of the week. I've been coaching for 3 years and a gymnast for 8 years.

I'm surprised there are that many people for you to handle, since technically there are rules you are expected to follow in terms of how many children you look at the monitor. At our gym, we're an instructor to 6 children aged 3-5, and 7 children aged 6 +. Thus, 30 between two instructors is difficult to bear.

You should probably talk to your boss about this, since you are having problems with all the control. You should not bribe them with candy. There are too many problems with food allergies - which led to our gym does not allow all staff to distribute food to the gymnasts.

What is your setup like? This helps me give you some more ideas, then maybe you can change, or give me an email and we can talk.

Start with the heat. Warm up consists, in our gym, ten to fifteen minutes before starting the class itself. It is composed of:

Cardio to start
- Running at around the track a few times, or from point A to point ba number of times.
- In the gym, there are lines that Velcro align ourselves with the children and get them to run to the wall or another line of Velcro. Here is what we would do next. We would like them to do a number of exercises that move, and also practice good manners, flexibility, and moves in gymnastics. Things like ...
~ Tuck jumps the wall and back
Leaps Cat ~
~ Front and Back Kicks (on foot)
~ Lunges
~ Forward and backward hopping, or on foot
~ Bear Walks (walking on hands and feet with arms outstretched and legs)
~ Leaps Front (Crouching, then jump repeatedly)
~ Step-Together-Step, etc.

Then we enter a circle and stretch.
Circles with arms ~ - Manacor, backward, then front to back, top to bottom.
~ Make an "X" or a "star" and stretching more than one side then the other, then down the middle with the legs straight.
~ Go on all fours to stretch the wrists - Manacor, hands, back, side ways, upside down.
~ Rolling your ankle - making circles with your feet to warm up your ankles
~ Pike and Straddle Stretch
~ Back bridges, and rock and roll.
~ Splits, each leg for 15-30 seconds, depending on the time you have to warm up. For two hour lessons, we usually divided at the beginning of the class warm up, then again at the end of the class during cooling.

Some other fun ideas could be ...

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