The sleepover for teenagers from our dojo was a great success!
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.
Our summer camp for young people aged 15-21 was exceptional this year: in addition to Martin and Pavel, three teachers who were still practicing in the youth group a few years ago also taught.
Like every year, we headed to the Atlantic coast: to practice aikido, swim in the ocean, and taste France!
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.
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.
For the fourth time, we organized a large international seminar for children and young people in Prague: Aiki4Kids 2024.
Two weeks of exercise and twice daily training, that’s how the trip to the French island of Oleron could be described in a nutshell.
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..
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.
Green hills, cold streams, narrow rock passes and in the middle of it all young people from Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Ukraine practicing aikido for a week.
We were in the Slovenský ráj again and it was wonderful!
That weekend there was to be a camp for young aikidists in the vineyard in Žernosky. But it was much, much more…
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.
We sat on the mats after practice, resigned expressions on our faces. I think Honza broke the silence: ‘When is the next training? And where?”
On that Thursday in November, the first snow fell in Stockholm. The beginning of winter. We slept on the tatami at the Iyasaka Aikidoklubb (there’s an insanely noisy air-conditioning system running at night) and got up at six in the morning. An hour practice, a quick change of clothes and a subway ride to Vanadis, where there was another morning practice at another club. Then we had breakfast at the cafe where Astrid Lingren used to go (Pipi Longstockking was written in the tenement across the park) and the lunchtime training was starting, which of course we also attended. Three workouts in half a day wouldn’t have been too much, but we kept up the pace of 3-5 hours of exercise on our sixth day in Stockholm… and we still had three more intense days to go.