Cam and Miss D had their first grading for Taekidokai today. They did very well and have both moved from white belt to brown.
Sensei came from Australia for the grading, and was fantastic with the kids. It wasn’t all serious, they had some fun, but hopefully they also learnt some lessons…… At one stage, he got some of the brown belts do do their kata with as much effort as they could, and then with as little. Of course with no effort they all felt silly – he asked them which felt better, training hard and trying to do your best, or being silly and making no effort. They all answered “training hard”, and he talked to them about how it was the same with everything in life, if you trained hard and gave it your best, it usually felt better.
He also told them to fix their mistakes as soon as they could – again this was in relation to their kata, but he also said that the same thing applied in life. That was Cameron’s lesson – he got his kata wrong first time and he went “Ooops” and stopped – Sensei encouraged him to keep going (reminding him that he may not have seen him if Sensei and Hanshi David had been looking at the grading sheet, so don’t say “oops”!!!) and to correct his mistake as quick as he could.
The photo’s aren’t flash – made the mistake of using the Screen instead of the viewfinder and not a lot is in focus, but here are a couple of shots…………….
"Yame" - Stop
sitting stance
Bart - front stretch
Miss D's - front stretch
Front punch
Punching
Press ups
Sit ups
Side splits
Brown Belt #1
Brown Belt #2
I was also impressed at how they sat for the next hour as everyone else did their grading!
