River City Inclusive Gymnastics or as I like to refer to us as RCIG is currently enrolling for our fall session(August 29-October 22). If someone had told me a year ago that I would quit my job as a special education teacher in order to stay home with my newborn son, and then six months later become a gymnastics coach I would have laughed in their face. However this is exactly what has happened and since January of 2016, when Coach Fletcher Hamblin and I began this class with 5 students and 3 family members enrolled as students, we haven’t looked back and are enjoying every minute.
Our inclusive gymnastics class follows the same routine as the other beginning gymnastics classes at River City Youth Fitness, as well as the same routine week to week. We always start with warm up relays, followed by some light stretching, followed by learning gymnastics through various obstacle courses set throughout the gym. The class is an hour long and the kids will go through three specific obstacle courses or activities. Each course or activity will last between 10-20 minutes depending on the gymnasts engagement. Since each child comes with a varying skills set we typically modify activities on the spot based on what we see. Additionally children that need one on one assistance have a coach that is assigned to them for the duration of the class. We strive to keep our classes to 10 students or less in order for us to deliver a quality program and to ensure that each gymnast gets the proper instruction. For our smaller classes there are always two coaches on staff and our larger classes based on students as well as student activity level could have up to 4 coaches and 4 volunteers.
We currently have a mix of high school, middle school, and adult volunteers that are being trained to help with our program. Even though our program is geared towards children with special needs, we are open to all kids hence the word inclusive in the title. We have a couple of sets of siblings that attend class in which one child has a special need and one does not. During our fall session we will have four class options for families to choose from but our goal is that we continue to have steady growth in order that we can add more and more class times each day.
If you are interested in our program, please visit our website or friend us on Facebook. Each gymnastics session is one time a week for eight weeks. And if you are confident that this is the program for you, simply call River City Youth Fitness at 804-784-1990 and ask for the inclusion program. There is no deadline to sign up, you can sign up at anytime during our 8 week session and jump right in.
We are very happy to be a sponsor of Knowdifferent which is a great resource for all children and all families in the community.