Saturday January 30th 2016 was the date that EMAP had been planning for a good few months, lot’s had gone on behind the scenes, from arranging flights, booking hotels and sorting out training venues to actually getting UK instructors to sign up for what was to be our first official event……
Presented by The legendary ‘Queen’ of children’s martial arts instruction Master Melody Shuman.
This course was for a select few UK Martial Arts instructors who were willing to leave their ego’s at the door and come and learn from the very best!
For those of you who don’t know, Melody changed the face of the martial arts world back in the late 90’s with the ‘Little Ninja’ programme. Not only in her native America, but throughout the world, before this programme young children were treated in most classes like young adults, with very little understanding of the relationship between child and instructor. Probably back in the early 90’s the demographic for most classes was 60% adults 30% teenagers with the other percentage made up of under 11’s. Certainly not 4-6 year olds.
Now those figures have been turned on their heads with the biggest percentage of students being children.
We at EMAP recognised this fact very early and were very fortunate to recruit Melody as a fellow director giving us the rights to market Melody’s amazing products to the UK with significant savings for EMAP members.
We arrived at St Andrews stadium, home to Birmingham City Football Club, our training facility for the day. The attendees were arriving as we started setting up the conference room. We had Instructors travelling from as far afield as Yorkshire, Devon, Herts and
Wiltshire, some highly experienced, and some with little or no knowledge.
After the initial ’Meet and Greet’ Melody kicked off the day with a brief bio of her achievements, which as stated before are most impressive.
We then moved on to the importance of having age specific classes, which in turn
led to Melody giving us an in depth understanding of each age groups expectations and goals.
Speaking as an Instructor with over 40 years’ experience I can tell you that I learnt so much about how each individual age category needs to be fully appreciated in order to initiate maximum success.
We broke for lunch, then got down to teaching kids warm up drills which were easy to implement for all styles. This was great fun even for us ‘older ones’ As stated before I thought I was pretty good at teaching, but I can honestly say that the 6 hours we spent with her was awe inspiring.
Engaging with kids is Number 1 and we all need to practise our craft to become experts in the art of ‘Edutainment’
The day ended with a Q&A session where Melody re enforced a lot of the methodology of the previous hours, which flew by, giving way to the old saying ‘Time flies when you’re having fun ‘
All in all the day was a resounding success and we’d like to thank everyone who attended
For those of you out there, who could not make it, you really should get the
Drills for Skillz programme www.drillsforskillz.com with over 1500 drills to choose from it will totally energise your schools and take them way past the next level!
For further details Email Mike Deedigan on mike@emapworld.com
