Learning to ride a bike

My six year old daughter has been going through the right of passage that is learning to ride a bike. People use the phrase “it’s like riding a bike” meaning that you never forget it once you learn the skill. This may be the case, but every time one of my children goes through the process I am reminded of how much hard work and practice is required before you can confidently ride.

I love riding and come from a big family who also love riding (my cousin rides professionally and was in the tour de France last year before he was involved in a spectacular crash- FYI he has completely recovered and is back racing!). I really want to pass the love of riding onto my children, so I love helping them to learn this lifelong-but-initially-tricky skill.

Like anything, there is an optimum trajectory for teaching someone to ride a bike. You can’t just expect them to hop on a bike and begin to pedal.

Their brains need to co-ordinate a lot of information- there are neural connections being made left-right and centre!

There is peddling, looking forwards and steering accordingly, breaking (foot and hand), starting, stopping and later changing gears, increasing speed (she has a 3 gear hand-me-down bike from her sisters).

There are various things we do as teachers to support our little learners and wanting to keep up with the latest ‘research’ in learning to ride, I decided to Google ‘tips for helping children learn to ride a bike’.

One of the tips that came up in the search was using a towel to hold them as they ride (see image below).

This one tip was an absolute game-changer for both of us!

She felt safe/supported and quickly grew in confidence.

I also felt confident that I could support her without straining my back and before I knew it she was off and riding.

I felt I could ever so slowly release the towel as she gained more confidence.

It was the perfect scaffold for both the teacher and the learner and I would not have known about it if I didn’t do some ‘research’.

This experience reinforced for me the importance of using research to guide our instruction.

I remember my dad teaching me to ride and having raced roadbikes (pre children) I consider myself to have good ‘expertise’ in bike riding, plus I have successfully taught my other two daughters to ride… so you could forgive me for thinking it was ok to just repeat what I had previously done with earlier children!

But things change, discoveries are made all the time (in bike riding and and maths education) so I encourage you to keep learning, keep researching and keep challenging your practice and approach to maths teaching. Because you never know, you might just come across a scaffold or idea that is a game changer for your instruction!