What to Do?

There’s sort of a “late or early” dilemma with kids class.

If kids are late, they often feel lost with the day’s class content.  They struggle to figure out what is going on, what was going on and what will be going on.

If kids are early, they often don’t know what to do with their time.  They treat the training floor as a playground.  Contact starts getting made.  Walls start getting slammed into.  What could have been valuable free practice time turns into the teacher having to come out on the floor and laying down the rules.

My solution to the early problem is to offer kids some skills during class and then encourage them to practice them in the time they get before class.  The skills might be: hitting the bag, rolls, cartwheels, jump rope – something that can be related to martial arts.  Then at the end of class I encourage them to spend a few minutes before and after class practicing them.

Maybe… just maybe… if the skill work is really fun, students will even want to show up early to class just to practice.