Ever wondered how our tennis activities help develop your child’s brain?
Our warm-ups play a crucial part – standing still with feet still and doing the body rotations and arm swings, leg-swings and rotations etc allow the children opportunities to cross the midline. Doing practice swings and hitting the ball all involve the children crossing their midline. Crossing the midline forces both sides of the brain to work together which helps develop higher order thinking skills, sensory integration, body awareness, critical thinking skills and emotional regulation – it helps to combine art (right brain) with science (left brain).
Is it all about brain development – no of course not. The warm-ups also help the children work on developing a stable base, which makes it easier to rotate the upper body further and have a bigger range of movement, which results in being able to hit the ball harder. We still want the children to understand the basic idea of tennis – ie hit the ball over the net one more time than their opponent. And we want to help your children develop a technique that gives them the best chance of doing so.
Getting the children to balance the ball on their racquet and move – it may be boring or challenging but what we are doing is checking how the children grip the racquet and have their palm facing upwards, ie where the ball is. This makes it easier for the children to learn to hit forehand shots.
Do we micro-coach? No way. Watching tennis would be boring if everyone played with the same technique, style and strategy. All of the elite tennis players have differences in how they hit the ball but their order of movements (being ready, watching the ball, moving to the ball, getting the racquet back, stepping and swinging, ie “the basics”) are all the same and similar to what your children do in our classes.
At Shaws Little League, the children learn to hit the ball, get a sweat up, have a laugh with their friends and develop their brains.
To find out more, please contact us at fun@shawslittleleague.com or 6440-9545.