Hi!
I'm Paige Theodosopoulos of Troop 546 and I am currently completing my Gold Award. The goal of my project was to make other children love figure skating as much as I did when I was younger. I skated competitively until the 9th grade. I would go in the mornings before school just to have time for it. At the start of high school I stopped and started teaching instead so as to keep it in my life but not have to make as much of a time commitment. I taught group lessons at the rink I used to skate at. Over the sessions of classes, I realized that many children would stop signing up. They would give up or lose interest, which made me very upset because I knew that if they were just given more attention and guidance they would be more keen on continuing their training. This inspired me to create my gold award project on skating safety in order to give kids that push and help. I created a position of teaching at my skating rink where I worked so I could do this. I became a helper of a sort, someone who could work with the kids who were having more trouble or who had fallen behind. Many of the teachers have a lot of kids in their group and can't neccesarily provide them the attention they might need. I tried to teach them little tricks like hands on your knees when you feel like you are going to fall, or practice on the wall first. I would fix their skate laces when they were loose and teach them to tie them properly so they wouldn't fall. Having a converstaion about school or their friends would help them forget they were even scared. Since I can no longer help at the skating rink I will be reposting/posting on this blog articles about safety for other sports, as well as ice skating.