One Saturday in April, we set out on foot with young aikidokas from Slapy to Štěchovice.
Laughter and concentration, clear stances and quick movements, mutual contact… on Saturday, we hosted the fifth international seminar for children and youth, Aiki4Kids! Around 150 children and young people (aged 5 to 21) practiced on the tatami, assisted by about 25 adult teachers.
As is customary at our club, we once again organized suburban camps for children during the first two weeks of July. What do these camps entail? A total of more than twenty children, a number of teachers and assistants, and, most importantly, ten days of fun, games, exercise, and Japanese culture.
We started the summer in our club with a visit of friends and colleagues from Berlin. We attended a seminar focused on the education of teachers of children, organized by the German Aikido Club Kikentai Berlin.
Young Aikidists in nature
One Friday in February we got on the Flixbus and went to Berlin for a seminar for teachers of children and teenagers, organized by our friends from Kikentai Berlin.
A very unusual sleepover…
For the fourth time, we organized a large international seminar for children and young people in Prague: Aiki4Kids 2024.
Once again we have prepared two dates of suburban aikido camps for children aged 6 to 12 years old for the beginning of summer. Both runs were successful and the kids and teachers had a lot of fun.
This year we managed the Sport for Two festival perfectly, even though there were about a thousand children in the Vinohrady Sokol Hall and it was really hot. We did four mini-training sessions in three hours and we must have had 100-200 kids crossing the tatami, a mix from six to thirteen years old. Isn’t that possible? For Martin and Tachan, it’s no problem..
Sleepovers in the dojo are one of the favourite events for children – this time we combined groups of children 8-10 years and 10-13 years. And according to the kids, it turned out to be one of the best sleepovers they can remember.
It seems that we are starting a new tradition – this was our second sleepover in the dojo and it was a great success again!
An article about our suburban camps, summer schools and camps appeared in the magazine Archa, published by the Czech Council for Children and Youth. You can read it in full here.
“Bang on you” – this was probably the most frequent phrase of our aikido weekend together. Traditionally, in early May, we went together with the aikido kids to the Svobodný statek na soutoku. The theme of the camp was the question, “What good is aikido to us in life?”
On Saturday morning in Prague, around 100 children started their first training on the big tatami… and it was a line from one side of the hall to the other. Check out the photos! And we weren’t all there yet, because the bus with the Ukrainian kids got delayed at the border and arrived a bit late. After a warm-up together, we divided into age categories – small kids, bigger kids and teenagers – and started real training sessions full of varied movement, games and most importantly aikido.