Teaching Children With Special Needs

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If you teach a youth football team there will come a time when you may have to teach a child who is physically impaired or has some sort of special needs condition. As coaches, we need to get him or her involved in the training as much as we can and help them to fit in without disrupting the rest of the team or getting injured in any way. A child's impairment can vary in many ways. It can be a simple situation of they may just have a lack of hearing, or there may be some loss of vision. There may also be some sort of loss of movement so maybe they cannot run as fast as other children.

How you deal with these situations will depend on what the condition is of the child. Before you even start with the training session, as a coach, it is best to have a chat with the child's parents to establish the full impairment and how it affects them in their normal life and also the goals and aspirations of the parents. You then have something to gauge how you handle the situation. Remember parents may be a bit apprehensive themselves and maybe looking to you for all the answers.

For things like a vision impairment, then they might have trouble seeing a white ball. So a simple change of a ball to a different color may help to deal with that situation. If the kid has a hearing impairment then you will have to find a way of communicating with them through some sort of signals or more demonstrations before the designed task is given so they can see what they want you to do. If your player has a disability so they can not run too well because of limb problems, then perhaps you can have the child doing a specific job. For example they could be the designated throw-in player, and you train them to just do that particular job. They could also be asked to be the designated corner kicker.

When the kids see their role in the game, their improvement will get better over the weeks of training just like the rest of the group. Having a child with special needs helps to enhance the rest of the team mates and gives them first hand experience of developing an understanding of other team mates needs and be able to be patient with them.

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