2024-08-07

Teaching my regular classes at the Ross Farnsworth - East Valley YMCA.

If you read my update from Monday, you’ll know that my classes have been displaced this week by tap dance lessons. Apparently this group appeared on America’s Got Talent, so that’s cool, but it’s still nice to have a place to train. Tonight we got moved into the preschool-age daycare room. Yep … tiny tables and chairs everywhere, no clear floor space, etc.

Fortunately, I planned ahead and gave a lecture on karate history, followed by a vocabulary game similar to “Concentration” or “Memory”, where players try to remember where face-down cards are located in order to match pairs of cards for points.

In the normal, children’s version of this game, you’d have a deck of cards with two apples, two pears, two elephants, … whatever. Then you’d put those cards face down on a table and players would take turns picking up two cards. If the cards match, they get to keep them and take another turn. If not, they have to put them back in exactly the same place. You know the game I’m talking about? Good. Now let’s make it about karate.

In my version of the game, the cards aren’t pairs of animals or shapes. Instead, the cards are the English and Japanese words for the same thing. For example, if you picked up a card that said “Downward Block”, you’d be looking for the matching card that says “Gedan Barai”, and so on. The point of this game isn’t really to find the matching cards, it’s to learn which cards match in the first place. The rest is just for fun.

This worked brilliantly and kept students entertained and engaged despite not being able to do a “traditional” karate workout in the space provided.