A few years back, neighbor's kids were in the back yard shooting clay targets. More like shooting at them. After watching miss after miss, I asked if I could try, and proceeded to bust 5 of 5......so gun and ammo not their problem. As near as I could tell, they were aiming at where the target was, not where it was going to be when the shot arrived. Same for some nephews last fall.

When I was learning, my dad had me go out in the yard with a garden hose.....straight jet stream and I was to aim at birds flying by. Purpose was to get the stream to stay in line with the bird. Quickly learned how much you have to lead them to get stream to catch up to them. It is a fluid swing, where you catch and pass the target, then maintain that swing even after the shot.

May also help to shoot a pattern board, put up a dot, aim right at it, then see see where the center of the shot string hits. Most assume it will be centered on what you aimed at, but the sight plain for some guns puts it higher. A common point has it 60/40, or 60% of the pattern hitting above the bead's aim point. There are a lot of reasons for that, but you still better know where the center of the shot string is going to go, relative to the front sight bead.

A lot of good advice, not much to add.

Last night we had our first class with kids on firearms safety. We started out asking what their reason for taking the class was? Out of a class of 20, 4 kids said they were taking the class so they could hunt and they wanted to be on the school trap team. They are required to pass firearms safety training to be eligible for the school trap shooting team. One of the 4 was a girl. We like to see that.

Thanks for the advice! Hopefully going to get out and shoot a couple of clays with a buddy or my dad and test out these different shotguns and see if any fit me better.