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Get your kids ready to hunt without devolping bad shooting habits
pyle762 posted a topic in Youth Hunters
So all my kids are members of the one shot, one kill club on all the game they have taken. Here is what I did to get them ready and thought someone may be able to use this for their kid's upcoming hunts. Kids tend to be recoil sensitive and can develop bad habits very easily by developing flinches, trigger jerking, etc. I think a big part of that is due to shooting too much and becoming recoil sensitive, because to a 12 year, even a .243 wil start to hurt after shooting a box of shells. Pain=bad shooting habits. I first did this with my 11 year daughter when she first drew her elk tag and has worked on the rest since then. First- Dry fire practice. Using Google Images I found as many elk pictures as I could; cows, spikes, bulls, even a few mule deer does for no-shoot scenarios. I put them on a slide show where each picture would be on the screen for 10 seconds. We would use the slide show one of two ways. The first, they would point out on each picture where their shot placement would be, acounting for differnt angles. Then the dry fire portion. With an UNLOADED rifle (I would always make them check and tell me if it was unloaded and I would re-check) they would dry fire practice at the slide show elk. They have ten seconds to open the bolt, pull it back and cock the rifle and get their shot off. I would be right next to them, watching the muzzle for any movement as they pulled the trigger. They quickly learned trigger disipline because a good trigger pull equals no movement when the gun went click. I would give feedback so they would know and they soon where able to start telling me if it was good or not. Then reload and do it all over again for the duration of the slide show. We would set up as far as possible from the TV with the scope on the lowest power. This would equal roughly sooting a live animal in the 50-100 yard range depending on the size of the animal in the photo. In the pictures they were only allowed to shoot cows, which is why mule deer, spikes, and bulls were included. By practicing this them became very comfortable with the basics of marksmenship and shooting at animals, not bullseyes. Second- They have to practice with a real gun too. For this, 95% of the shooting was done with a .22 scoped bolt action set up very similar to their hunting rifle. They would shoot at pictures of elk on 8x11 sheets of paper at 25 years, which would equate to fairly long shot on a life size target. This helped them see that they can hit center mass on an animal with a real gun without devopling bad habits due to recoil. When they would shoot their hunting rifle it was only one or two shots, just to get a feel for it. So far this systen has worked great for us. Just wanted to pass the tips along as another way to get your jr hunter ready for the hunt.