Special Olympics "Young Athletes" Program

Matthew had his first session of the Young Athletes program today. This is a free program that meets for almost 3 hours every Saturday in August. (Today he only lasted 1.5 hours, but that's ok.) Matthew had a great start...he loved dancing to the warm up music and wasn't shy about going into the center of the circle.


Then the kids (who are aged 3 to 7 years) were broken into groups and sent to one of six stations: soccer, baseball, track, obstacle course, bowling, and basketball. Matthew refused to participate in the basketball corner and ran around the gymnasium instead (as did a few other "explorers"). He was a little more interested in bowling and absolutely LOVED the obstacle course.


A pretty volunteer tried to get him to play baseball, but it didn't last long b/c there are sliding glass doors outside the gym and those are Matthew's favorite thing to watch (open & close). He never made it to soccer (he was pretty overwhelmed by then).

We did stay for the parachute activity, and Matthew enjoyed running underneath it but got frustrated when it came down and the kids had to get out. So we waited for him to stop fussing, offered him juice, and said let's go home. We wanted to leave on a positive note so he'll be excited to go back next week. I think this 5 session "camp" will be really good for him b/c he's with a group of 20 kids (plus their parents/siblings & camp personnel) and is being introduced to sports/new physical activities. (P.S. You can click on the 3 pictures to make them bigger.)