Teaching aid for young shooters

[Steve Pennington]

I started my son shooting his Davy Cricket .22 last year, when he was 4 years old.  I was having trouble explaining how to put the crosshairs on the target.  Got to thinking about how to show him.  I remmembered a game on my Sierra reloading software, Burris Varminteer, it show a crosshair on the screen.  I sat down with him and showed him how to play and talked to him about proper sight picture while we played.  After that he started shooting better.  

He shot his first handgun on monday.  My TC contender with a 10" .22 barrel.  I started him off shooting small balloons and he hit everyone of them.  I let him use a front rifle rest.  

Sometimes it helps to think outside the box to find good teaching aids.

"Take a young person shooting and hunting this year"

[Jeff Vicars]

Steve that was a good idea. Anyone else used similar stuff as teaching aids?

[Bowpredator]

I have cutout the shapes of a front and rear sight and used them as a visual aid to show a youngster how to line the sights up on a target.  When my daughter starts target shooting at animal targets, I plan on using a little laser pointer I have to remind her where the aiming point is.  I dont plan on leaving it on while she shoots, but just occasionally to reinforce the vitals and will also let her use it to show me where she should aim.

[Bowpredator]

Well, this saturday is our youth season here in Missouri and I will be taking my 7yr old daughter.  I have also been working with my niece and nephew and they are darn fine shots now and have passed their hunter safety class.  One important step in their training IMO was to go through hunting magazines and look at pictures of deer in various positions and have them tell me if they would shoot or not and where they would aim if they would shoot.  Another thing I think was very important was I took a cardboard lifesize deer archery target.  It had the vitals drawn out so I let them shoot at it like that for a bit, then i took some brown feed sack paper and covered the vitls so that they could practice finding the correct aiming point on a deer.  I told them that the deer isnt gonna be walking around out there with a target on them so they have to be able to find the right spot to aim for on that patch of brown.  In the beginning stages, I used a laser pointer to re-emphasize the correct aim point on the solid brown target.