Squad Selection

Whilst flitting through the various pages of the website - and what a great website it is - and blog articles, the Squad Selection date came to mind. Seeing as it's not really that far away, a week before the next kyu grading, I haven't received any requests to try out.

Hopefully our current members will continue.

It's the Students!

I have more or less come to the conclusion that a successful lesson is not totally dependent on the teacher / instructor. More of it is to do with the students. They make the lesson. Please don't say "Oh has he only just realised that?". I have known it for quite some time.

"So why are you mentioning now?" I hear you ask. Simple. I never had a blog before and at my age, by the time I get home from one of these great classes, have tea and wind down - I forget! Not tonight Josephine. Class at Honbu was buzzing with energy, down from my DAN grades to the white and orange belts. Time flies by and it just happened to be a night I needed to finish on time to pick up one of Grace's friends from work as they are off to Brighton for Grace's birthday and as I'm off to Newcastle in the early hours, timing was of the essence.

Fortunately all was okay and I got back in plenty of time for them to set off for Brighton. I now have 3 days off from teaching but not training. So enjoy my absence peeps. Back strong on Monday!

Oss!

Best laid plans

Why is it when you sit down and meticulously draft and plan out what you need to say, after publication and distribution you discover you managed to put in the wrong date! Hahaha! Hopefully, not too many people got the wrong info and managed to read the follow up email as well.

The leaflet drop is due to take place on Monday & Tuesday 2nd & 3rd September. Please let me know if you can help us:

Online Form. Click Here!

Summer Camp so far!

Little stars! That's what they are. All different and all with their own little quirks! - And that's the helpers!No resignations yet which is a result. I think I'd lost two at this time last year. Speaking of which, 4 out of 5 of the helpers are previous Summer Camp attendees.

Having a lot of fun and a great feeling of pride watching them evolve in front of your eyes every day. What on earth will happen tomorrow?

Oss!

Day 1 TSKC (Tairyoku Summer Karate Camp)

All Students turned up on time and after the nerves had settled, were ready to learn. We managed to cover a lot of things today, including;

Straight punch

Stepping

Turning

Stepping punch

Counting to 5 in Japanese

How to make a fist

Yoi / Yame / Mawate

Kiai!

Ranking system

Downward block

Three distinct sections of karate - Kihon / Kata / Kumite

Need to cover Origins of karate; Why we do karate; When we do karate; Part 1 of Kihon kata; Rising head block amongst others tomorrow.

My fantastic helpers today were Hannah J; Rachel K; James A; Emma L and Jennifer G. Oss!

Just another few tweaks!

Spent this morning fiddling around with the website. The last time I did this, I broke it and it took me an hour and a half to find out what I'd done wrong and fix it. Don't think I broke it this time though.

A few CSS3 additions made to enhance the sidebar; fixed some links regarding the videos opening in correctly sized windows and finally, added additional information for the kata's which opens in a new window - from the Kata list page.

Need to go and eat now.

Oss!

Honbu -Thursday

I'd like to report that the Pelvic Thrust lesson went well but unfortunately somebody had alerted the Vice Squad as to the lesson plan and they had staked out the dojo with specialised covert officers posing as new members, surveillance cameras, recording equipment and a 4 year contract with Vivid Entertainment Group!

So instead, I forced myself to take the high grades through Tekki Nidan whilst the lower grades practised their Kumite and Kata.

Good lesson despite the absence of pelvic Thrusts.

Tonights Lesson - A twist!

Little bit of a twist tonight guys. I am extending the knowledge I have by sharing it with you. We will need to work together in order to move forward. Probably 95% of you would not have done this before.

Oss!

TSKC Leaflet Drop

I have thought long and hard about the proposed leaflet drop and have decided to defer it until the last week in August / first week in September. The reasoning behind this stems rom the fact that hopefully, more people will be back from their holidays preparing for the new school year and therefore will receive the flyer with interest, rather than picking it up off the mat with numerous other flyers, after returning home from holiday.

The next thing to decide is the best method to instigate the distribution. I was thinking of arranging 3 to 4 groups of people, each group with 4 or more people, meeting at different dojos on the same day and doing a mass drop. This is instead of a large group hitting just one area.

I will provide street maps for the group leader and as roads are completed, they can be marked off on the map so if that area is not completed, we will be able to see at a glance what is left to do.

What are your thoughts?

Enjoyed Class

So why on earth did a basic lesson actually feel so good?

Todays lesson was focussing on Brown & Black belts in a way. Firstly, we tried a few combinations to get the basis of what we were going to do first. So what did we spend our time on doing? - Ushiro geri! So much detail is involved. The Junior grades concentrated on proper technique for Mae geri and Yoko geri keage from Kiba dachi.

The second part of the lesson concentrated on Tekki Shodan to count - preparing some of the students for the Instructors course in October. The Junior grades concentrated on the katas for their grade.

Felt really good.

Kata Fest

Totally different! Decided what I was going to teach at Winslow this evening and set off for the dojo. Got there way too early but that's not a problem, I canary out what I want to put into practice later.

Students arrived and it dawned on me 3 minutes before the lesson was about to start was that I needed to drastically change my lesson plan. So I did.

Turned into a bit of a kata fest! Boy did they need it. I'm sure a lot of good has come out of that lesson.

Bierton - Honbu

Not a huge turnout this evening but those who turned up, trained hard! I cannot ask for a lot more. 13 students split 6 / 7 between big grades and 4th kyu and below. The lesson started off after a great warm up by Carlos but I don't think the students were expecting the basics they got. Ramped it up a bit for the lower grades and something totally different for the high grades - just like Tuesday and Wednesdays classes.

Everyone was lead through a version of Taikyoku Nidan / Sandan and having got halfway through, left the lower grades to work the rest out for themselves. Meanwhile, the high grades were taken through Ji'in. Thankfully, due to the weird combinations I made them go through at the start of the lesson, this made teaching the kata so much easier. Only one of the students had done the kata before but this was years and years ago.

Ji'in is important for the execution of many simultaneous techniques and the often-repeated stances, enabling swift changes of direction while maintaining balance, power and steps of equal length. It has, however, been removed from the Japan Karate Association teaching and grading syllabus. Despite that, it is such a nice kata.

Winslow class this evening

Thought I would try something a little different tonight, just to see if it works and whether the students take to it. 

Hmmm. Feedback was good but whether I can apply this every lesson is another question. 

Really enjoyed the class though. 

Weather

This weather gives no inspiration to train. OI can understand why students don't want to train in either this heat or humidity but more so I understand the students who do turn up and train.

Thank you.

Who actually goes to the Website?

There are days when I think I am the only person in the whorl (with the exception of Lloyd and Nick) who actually looks at the website!

Bierton Combined School

Why do they appear to be the only school in Bucks that will not hand out flyers / leaflets to the students whether its free, for payment or a donation. I can't understand, either, why they complain when you stand outside their school and distribute to the parents. Surely they caused the situation in the first place by not accepting to distribute the leaflets.

So I spent 45 minutes handing flyers for the Summer School to the parents before I was confronted by a very young female teacher. Just the right person to confront a very large man handing out flyers. Took them long enough to be 'vigilant'.

I was called in to see the Head which I agreed to do. I explained to him what was happening and his response was: "Well we wouldn't distribute your flyers anyway as we run our own Summer School".

Choice!

No more Updates!

At 5.45pm on this glorious Sunday afternoon - glorious because it's not too hot - I have finally decided that there is nothing else I can do to update the website.

I have added IFTTT to update Twitter and FB whenever a TSKC event is about to start which I suppose is totally pointless unless you're less than 10 minutes away from the event!

It's technology and I need to utilise it. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Anyone else completed my online form? I'll go looksie!

TSKC Website

I am sure I spend far too much time on the website!

Almost daily I am either updating the site with news; training updates; fixing errors or, mor recently, making small updates to the sites look & feel.

I get a lot of pleasure from 'tweaking' the site. Whether it's just adding a fixed logo to the site; hiding content on the site; creating a blog - I just find it fun to do. The problem is, it tends to either

• Keep me up to silly o'clocks in the mornings
• Break the existing site in some way which takes me another hour or more to fix! (Secretly, that's probably one of the most exciting bits!)

So what are the latest updates?

1. Branded Logo that stays in a fixed position bottom right.
2. Easy access to the Top of the Page via always visible link
3. Dynamic floating menu at top of the main pages
4. New Kata page consisting of videos of Enoeda and Ohta Sensei's
5. Updated Events list
6. Embedded Google Calendar of events
7. Reminder Post-It note on main page re Summer School
8. Change of Members Details form to update club records
9. FAQ link on main page
10. Updates of forms on Downloads page
11. Not as recent: addition of Promotional Video
12. Twitter account created and Twitter Feed added to Website
13. NEW Blog
14. Updated Interactive Noticeboard / News feed
15. Club Mailing List

Is there anything you think should be added / removed? Let me know.

Annual BBQ

Whilst we are on the subject of "do's", last years attendance at the Annual BBQ was pretty poor compared to previous years. It could all be down to the fact that we had bad weather.

TSKC is holding the BBQ again this year, in the same spot in Wendover Woods.

Are you going?

Christmas Do

Any ideas what we can do for Christmas this year?