Are you near the end of your Form.....

School classes are now winding down for Half Term in the UK.  This means that everything the children have worked on for the last month or so, may be lost in a holiday!  As an adult, I know that if I do not practise my forms every week they get sloppy and I forget the sequence of movements.  All the children have been given homework to remember what they have learned so far.  Unless they can remember when they return from Half Term, we will have to start again.

We have practised for five weeks, the first week we spent going over all the Forms they learned over the last few years, most of them have been training in the school clubs for at least a year if not five!  There is a bit of a problem that a lot of the students in school lose out on continuity in the school holidays, so we end up having to teach all the relevant forms again at the beginning of term.  I do have one student who comes to all three days, he was getting mighty sick of it that week, but, without knowing the forms from before, I do not feel I can pass on their next ones. The children realised we had spent a number of sessions redoing the old forms again and they then voiced their concerns of, 'we haven't learnt any of the new forms yet, can we stop going over the old ones now'  This certainly focussed this groups minds! 

Our teaching includes a set way of getting people to remember things, we do it all by the count, four to eight moves a week, so after four to six weeks, people usually can do the whole thing reasonably well.  However, they do need to practise in between classes and this is where difficulty lies,.  The children would much rather play at their own games not practise their karate, even though they all tell me they like it.

There are a few that really do practise and you can tell, they learn quicker than the others and due to this enthusiasm, we can teach them in advance of their grade.

So I have a couple of children who are now learning in advance of their grade, they are willing and seem to have an aptitude for it.  

I believe I have the students on track for their next grading, fingers crossed, they practise this holiday.