Athletics
Athletics is public in a way few other sports are. You stand alone, everyone watches, every metre is measured. The visual support below breaks each event down so a child can turn attention inward, to the movement, rather than the bench beside them.
♀Athletics
An illustration of a girl running past hurdles with a gold medal.
About this visual support
It isn't the running or jumping that wears many kids down at athletics practice. It's the frame around it: a track with markings, a coach with a tape measure, other children waiting in line and watching exactly how far you got. Every event becomes a visible evaluation.
Cards that lay out the moments of an event – run-up, jump, landing, walk back – pull the child's attention from the comparison to the movement itself. You can look at the card before a throw and talk about the arm's path, not who threw furthest in the last round. For children who get stuck on others' results, that can be the difference between wanting to try again and quietly stepping back.
A practical tip: place the focus card closest to the child and let the rest of the sequence sit behind. That way only the next step shows, not the whole drill. In Routined you can keep a separate sequence per event and pull up the right one depending on what today's session is about.