THE FirstBIKE STORY
ONE MAN, ONE MISSION; TWO WHEELS
Ralf Coerschulte, an avid German cyclist, product designer, and father, developed FirstBIKE with one goal: to build the best balance bike for younger children, allowing them to learn to ride a bike intuitively and without stress.
After years of fine-tuning and testing, he succeeded in creating an unparalleled product that is deemed to be the safest on the market in terms of features supporting a child’s physical development.
FirstBIKE has also proven to be a great helper when it comes to the development of a child’s self-confidence, sense of independence, and enjoyment of learning.
BALANCE
A Key to Successful Learning
Some of the "equipment" your child needs to have in good working order for learning at school to be easeful and enjoyable.
Vision and hearing, good fuel and hydration are obvious to most of us. However, many parents and teachers do not realise the importance of good balance to the process of thinking. Let us explore the sense of BALANCE.
Balance is the ability of the individual to maintain equilibrium, to sit erect in an upright posture, to be able to stand on two feet without swaying, to be able to walk without falling over, and to be able to maintain an upright posture even in the dark.
Good balance enables you and your child to concentrate, sit still and listen when required, to think clearly, to succeed at reading, spelling and mathematics and to enjoy sporting activities.
From the moment of birth the infant has an inbuilt urge to know where upright is in order to be able to stand unsupported and then to walk. When we look and see how tiny the feet of a 12 month old baby are, and how large their head is in comparison, it is indeed a miracle when the baby learns to balance and then take her first steps.
Every healthy child in fact has an irrepressible need to move and struggle to attain an upright position. All of this early childhood movement builds a sensory “map” in the child’s brain of where they are in space at any particular time. Creeping and crawling on all fours, rolling on the floor, rocking to and fro, cruising the furniture, finally standing alone unsupported, spinning, twirling, swinging and rolling down hills and are all activities most children love, and will repeat them over and over again.
The repetition of these movements results in a store of movement patterns which are developed by the vestibular nucleus in the brain and then stored for ready access in the cerebellum, the part of the brain which coordinates our movements. When enough information has been processed and stored in the cerebellum, the toddler sets out on his journey of exploration of the world.
By the age of 5-6 years the young child has enough information and experience stored to enable him to run, jump, hop, skip at will and also sit still and listen when required. This ability to keep our heads still and upright enables us to think clearly and to concentrate. This is a key capacity which each child needs to develop if they are to succeed at school.
It is therefore very important that as parents we do not interfere with this process. The struggle itself is important, and the infant should not be aided by the use of walkers, jolly jumpers, bouncinettes and the like. These restrict the natural movement of the baby and inhibit the formation of pathways in the brain which will later be used for learning.
LEARNING TO RIDE
Also Helps Develop Sense of Balance
Just like walking on a Balance Beam, learning to ride can improving your static and dynamic stability, as well as your sense of body position (balance). There are two obstacles to learning to ride a bike - First is pedaling and second is balancing. A bike with training wheels helps your learn to do the first, Balance bike or call "Push bike" helps you learn to do the second.
For generations, when we learned to ride a bike we did so with training wheels. But when it came time to take them off and ride without the extra support of the training wheels, things got difficult and scary. That's because training wheels not teaching children how to balance, and learning to balance is the hard part of learning to ride; the pedaling's the easy. Most kids do a better job of learning how to ride a bike if they start off learning how to balance first, After that, they have no problem moving to a bike with pedals.