Any archery specialists?

[terminalterror]

I'm going to be working as the archery specialist at a camp in MA this summer (first timer) and was wondering if anybody here has any advice to impart?

I've had some training here in the UK, but all my coaching experience is with University students, not kids.

[Smudge]

Make sure they know how important it is to follow the rules at the range - maybe demo with a melon or something.

Make it fun for those who are not shoting maybe with wordsearches of stuff

[crbtigger]

I LOVE archery, we do all kinds of games and stuff
Make sure that you start the kids close enough to the targets so they can actually get arrows on the targets, then gradually move back. If not and you start them to far away they will miss and get discouraged.
Work them on learning how to aim and improve their score
Pin balloons to the targets, Play tic tac target, teach them to keep score, I have some fun paper tarets that i bought and pin them to the big targets.
Some have apples with numbers, balloons with numbers and so on.

[Flower]

I love archery. Safety is definitely number one here, and celebrating whatever progress the campers make is great. I didn't ever really play archery games, but instead the program at the camp I worked at focused on gaining skill levels. With kids, it's important to be patient.
Depending on the session length of your camp you may get to help the campers make a lot of progress in their skills.

[Smudge]

My last camp offered a bead system for camp craft skills - as you gained a skill you earned a bead - each skill was diff color - and then at the end of the session the campers cos t string with any beads they had earned, and there was even a bead they could get if they hadn't done everything they needed to do to complete a skill bead.

You could do something like this for archery with the beads representing shotting distances or something.

[cowboy85]

I taught archery last year at camp and it was a lot of fun. First off, your camp will probably send you to some sort of instructor certification, unless you already hold one. You will get some good ideas there. Like others were saying dont make the kids shoot from too far back, otherwise they will get discouraged. And play some games with them. One of our campers' favourites was "painting". We covered the target with a big white paper, then filled balloons with some paint and tacked them up there. They shot the balloons and made some crazy paint patterns.

[crbtigger]

We covered the target with a big white paper, then filled balloons with some paint and tacked them up there. They shot the balloons and made some crazy paint patterns.

Hey that is a really fun idea!

[terminalterror]

I taught archery last year at camp and it was a lot of fun. First off, your camp will probably send you to some sort of instructor certification, unless you already hold one. You will get some good ideas there. Like others were saying dont make the kids shoot from too far back, otherwise they will get discouraged. And play some games with them. One of our campers' favourites was "painting". We covered the target with a big white paper, then filled balloons with some paint and tacked them up there. They shot the balloons and made some crazy paint patterns.


That one does sound awesome (apart from having to clean things up afterwards).

I've already (well, almost, I've done all the learning but still have a mountain of paperwork to get through) got a qualification, and as I'm arriving late because of exams, I'll only be there 2 days before the kids arrive.

Sounds like my camp have never had anybody that knew what they were doing before. I've only got 18 months of archery experience, but I've learned a lot and I'm sure I can train up my kids to be miniature shooting machines :)


Safety will be the most important thing. Would it be a good idea to recap the safety stuff at the start of the second session as some form of quiz?

[Smudge]

Whenever I have run archery sessions I have recapped the rules at the begining of every session. Cos other wise they will just say they don't know them when you remind them that they are doing something dangerous.

[cowboy85]

I too went over saftey rules every time kids came to the range. But you have to remember that most kids have very short attention spans, and all they want to do is shoot arrows. So you need to make your safety speech as short as you can with still getting the job done. Get them involved by asking questions so they don't lose focus on what you're saying. And most archery instructors at my camp had little to no previous experience, so you will be fine.

[Smudge]

At the second camp I worked at the archery instructors were generally the CIT's

but I ended up with useless CITs or ones who had never even shot an arrow and were only at camp for the last 2 weeks of the summer - so i ended up doing most it. luckily i had done a bit of archery at uni so knew enough to cover the fact that i had never been trained to teach it.

[terminalterror]

This thread is reassuring.

Even though I've never taught archery to kids before, I feel overqualified in that I've actually been taught how to teach archery properly to beginners. All I have to do is adapt things to make them more fun for the kids.

I'm guessing that next year's freshers at uni are going to be getting the fruits of my new experiences and will get to try all sorts of childish games.

Slightly different priorities at a university archery club though. As everybody starts as a novice, then leaves once they are done with their degree, you constantly have to be training people up to replace the good archers that just left if you want to be at all competitive. My archery club is probably the 4th best student club in the UK.