NEWSLETTER 4th January 2000

Hi All!

I hope that you have all had a very good Christmas and an equally as good millennium celebration.

Helena and I spent most of the time at the beach doing very little and keeping to a very strict diet of beer and chocolate. Consequently, Mr flabby here is on an even stricter diet of air and water in order to be in shape for the term to come!!

But, our batteries are recharged and we are very much looking forward to another year of training and advancement, and we hope that all of you are as well.

The long awaited new grading syllabi are ready and will be implemented this term. A lot of thought has gone into these syllabi and we are very excited at the prospect of the differences they are going to make. We believe that they will make both teaching and learning easier but both of the syllabi are very comprehensive, so it is going to mean a lot of training for everyone!!

In the entire time that I have been training, both juniors and senior students have followed the same syllabus. This is always presented quite a number of problems:

Those instructors that strictly enforced the same standards for both groups found that juniors just never graded and consequently, they left.

Those instructors that followed the same syllabus for both groups, but relaxed the standards for the juniors found that junior standards slipped further and further.

I introduced the MBI Merit Badge system to our organisation in 1987 and these helped a lot.

But we have always felt that neither the grading systems nor the use of merit badges have achieved their full potential. We have been experimenting over the last couple of years with different grade and badge implementations and as a result, we have slowly come to the realisation that the needs and wants of juniors are very different to those of senior students.

This is why we have, at last, tailor made a completely different junior syllabus. This syllabus concentrates on aspects that we have found that kids learn well and removes the complexities that only mature students have a hope of understanding and getting good at.

We have also fully integrated merit badges into the syllabus and grading system. The badges have been split into groups and will serve as prerequisites for grades and juniors will now only be permitted to attempt badges relevant to their grade. A lot of new badges have been introduced.

Seniors will be pleased to know that their syllabus has also been revised/improved. Some requirements have been removed and some new ones have been introduced. Enjoy!!!!JJJ

A bound copy of both new syllabi is available to any interested students at a cost of $20 each. Alternatively, if you e-mail me at ghjs@hnpl.net I will e-mail you a copy free of charge. The file is quite large and is written in Microsoft Word '97 format and has been compressed using WinZip. If you don't have e-mail but you do have a computer that can read these documents, give me two disks and I will copy them for you.

We now have a supplier of Karate equipment here in Hamilton.

Robert Smith at 07-846 2913 or e-mail nzkwrobbie@xtra.co.nz is the supplier of Bushido martial Arts Products. He can be contacted if you want to buy new karate suits, belts or other equipment at a cheaper price and a better quality that we

have been used to in the past. Also, being local, you can even collect the goods the same day if you want.

The last thing that I wanted to say before we get onto the individual group sections is that we are considering getting some club t-shirts, sweat shirts and track suits made up. Could you let me know what you would be interested in as well as how many so that I can investigate some prices?

JUNIORS:

  Well done everybody!! There was not one of you that didn't make some considerable progress last term.

 We would like to congratulate Leighton on getting his red belt; Mark for yellow; Jess, Mwilje, Logan, Kent and David for achieving orange belts; Gretta, Andrew, Keegan, Zack A, and Michael for getting your greens and also Ericka, Romelli, Ocean, Leon and Elye for Blue belts. Great effort!!!!!!

Orange belt & under:

Gold Medal: David Witham

Green Belt & above:

Gold Medal: Ocean Rhind

Bronse Medal :  Leon van Berkel  

The end of term sparring competition was also very exciting, the red team winning 9 matches to blue team's 5 matches. Well done!    

Last couple of things for juniors; from now on, the training sessions will start at 6.00pm sharp. We will be there from 5:45 and keen students will make use of this time to stretch and practise. Non-keen students are welcome to continue to play games as before but we will not be tolerating repeating latecomers without prior agreement.

Also, we advise parents to feed your kids before training. It is quite easy for us to tell which kids are hungry as they run out of steam so much quicker and find it much harder to concentrate.