Kids
Posted: Sun Jul 10, 2011 8:23 am
In my dojo I find that motivating kids for kihon and kata can be a bit of a challenge sometimes. This year I came up with a cunning scheme.
The initial idea was to 'play' a piece from a kungfu movie and take it from there. Then I realized I might as well use our own kata to set up a 'play'. And so we did. Mind you, this is more theatre play than proper kata. In 'play' the kata becomes a mess. But I didn't mind, because it was a means to train some 'proper' kata. And it worked because the kids never trained kata and kihon so intensively...
All of us wound up having great fun doing this. I told the kids there was one 'heroe' who gets attacked by 'villains'. They get that. But then offcourse the villains have to be defeated, so they insisted they drop down on the ground. In the final perfomance at the kyu exam, they skipped the part where the villains get up again as 'zombies' to chase the heroe. They came up with that part all by themselves. :-) But I guess at the perfomance they were a bit timid because of the audience.
The initial idea was to 'play' a piece from a kungfu movie and take it from there. Then I realized I might as well use our own kata to set up a 'play'. And so we did. Mind you, this is more theatre play than proper kata. In 'play' the kata becomes a mess. But I didn't mind, because it was a means to train some 'proper' kata. And it worked because the kids never trained kata and kihon so intensively...
All of us wound up having great fun doing this. I told the kids there was one 'heroe' who gets attacked by 'villains'. They get that. But then offcourse the villains have to be defeated, so they insisted they drop down on the ground. In the final perfomance at the kyu exam, they skipped the part where the villains get up again as 'zombies' to chase the heroe. They came up with that part all by themselves. :-) But I guess at the perfomance they were a bit timid because of the audience.