u/Happy-Jackfruit7256

My son is turning 5 at the end of summer and is loving figure skating. He has expressed wanting to add more ice time for ice skating..

Currently he does 1 learn to skate, 1 private lesson, and 1 public skate with me a week. He’s loving it to the point where he will stay on the ice during public skate for 1.5-2hour and will skate on the ice on his own.

Does anyone has any advice for this age, his last learn to skate class was not super helpful since he was pretty bored and the skill levels were mixed to a point where half his classmates could barely march forward without help from the teacher and it slowed the class curriculum down a lot. He did get moved up, but I’m not sure if they are going to move up the whole class like they did last session.

I am thinking about increasing his ice time based on him asking to skate more, in your experience, what would you recommend for his age? A 2nd group class, or just adding extra public sessions?

I've been skating now for about 10 weeks, I'm absolutely loving it. I'm in a group class and doing privates and while I love both my sessions I'm feeling a bit frustrated. I'm in adult 2 (our rink is really like 3/4) but we're working on mostly back crossovers, 3 turns, 2/1 foot spins, and even doing waltz jumps. I feel pretty good about the adult 2 except maybe forward crossovers, I can do, but I'm sure they're not pretty.

In my private sessions, I have a pretty technical coach, which I like.. but we do almost the same skills every session with sometimes adding a new skill or two. I practice a lot outside of sessions so I was feeling like I was doing pretty well and then my last session everything that I thought I was doing better still wasn’t good enough and wrong(literally every skill). Anyways, we're pretty much just do swizzles F/B, backwards stroking, 2 foot power pulls, inside edges, lunges, 2 foot turns, and cross rolls. Nothing that I'm working on in my group classes. After my last lesson, hearing so many corrections on my basics that I thought were pretty good, I wish my group class was either going slower, or I could work on more of the stuff in my group lesson with my coach.

I guess my question is do I just continue with what I'm doing? Or maybe talk to my coach? (I feel weird asking him to work on harder stuff when I guess my basics still aren't good?), my other thought was to maybe switch to my group coach for privates (she's less expensive, and seems to push us a lot more). I don’t think I would feel as frustrated if my group classes weren’t skipping ahead as much, so I’m not sure what the best thing to do is since I don’t want to progress with sloppy technique. But I also feel like I’m really struggling with my group class skills and feel like I’m most likely going to fail my test out.