Kid's judo and big-folks' aiki

Last night we had a superb kid's judo class. We worked on all our usual moving, falling, etc... Then got into some games that simulate different parts of randori. We did British bulldog (Sorry, Jill reminded me of the game but I couldn't remember the name she used, and it reminds me of British bulldog that we played as kids.) This was crawling man with one man in the middle and everyone else crawling across the mats with the man in the middle choosing someone to immobilize. Crawlers who are stopped become stoppers. The last crawler left unstopped wins.

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We also played with knee-grab randori. Start with a normal grip on the jacket and move around with the goal of securing a knee grab. The second form of randori that we played was really exceptional. Start with normal grips on the jacket and the goal is to win by taking a side or rear control (i.e. bearhug around the waist). to do this you have to remove one of his grips from your jacket and either spin him or offbalance him and slide around him. The kids did really well with this. The kohaku shiai for November is next week.

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In aikido, we worked on tegatana emphasizing how the unbendable arm helps with balance in the turns and how we should keep placing our feet under our butts instead of trying to move our butts over our feet. We spun thru hanasu a couple of times then got into chain #2 again to work on the sharp turn-shomenate-wakiatame chain and the kotetaoshi-maeotoshi-hikitaoshi chain.