Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Helping kids ride bicycles [Bryan]

Andrew has been learning to ride a bicycle this week. After going through this process twice now, there are a few things I would recommend.

1. Use a very small bicycle, one that lets the child easily touch the ground. This makes it a much less scary process and gives the child more confidence.

2. Tell the child to wiggle the handlebars around, rather than hold them straight. Sometimes I think kids believe that they have to hold the handlebars perfectly straight, which is not how you balance yourself.

3. Start them off going down a small hill. That way, they can focus on balancing at first rather than pumping the pedals.

4. We tried riding on the grass, but this just made it difficult to balance, steer, and pedal. Just start on the sidewalk or road, that's what I say.

Anyway, I hope this helps somebody, somewhere.

1 comment:

Merkley Jiating said...

This will be very helpful one day. The grass part makes sense but I think I would have tried it too.in