Homework for the week of March 5th

The two most difficult things to teach 4 year olds is not to use their hands and not to kick the ball with their toe.   When you are practicing with your kiddo please encourage them not to pick the ball up with their hands unless they are the goalie or throwing the ball in.    You will need to constantly reinforce this because at this age they think with their hands and not with their feet.

Kicking the ball with their toe is a very natural for beginning players and if your child is anything like mine then they will likely argue with you about this.  When they use their toe to kick the ball they have no control over where it will go and so encourage them to kick the ball with their shoelaces like the video below illustrates.   A game that I like to play with my son is basically target practice in the back yard.  I make several "targets" out of a normal sheet of paper and to foster learning I write either a number or letter on it.  We tape them to the fence and practice hitting the targets by kicking our soccer balls at them.  I will call out a letter or a number and he and I both will try to hit it with our ball.  If one of us hits it then we of course have to do an obnoxious celebration like they do on TV when they score a goal which he absolutely loves!  You can also do this same game to practice throw ins.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92rY1x0exGI