Taekwondo + storytelling = EF

🥋📖 Why are children more "determined..." Taekwondo class time becomes a tale?

For 3-5 years old, the doll is really alive. The big cloth is really home, or it can become a "secret tunnel," a "dragon's den," or a "mission outpost" that he must pass.

The question is...

Why just turn ordinary rehearsals into narratives

How can children focus on fun and make things harder?

The answer lies in the nature of the child's brain.

Children aged three or five have not learned the world through adult reasoning.

"This activity helped develop my big bundle of muscles and EF."

But he thinks we're going to help our friend in the story! We have to go through this stage! We have to wait for the signal or the dragon will wake up!

This is why Junbi designed the Taekwondo EF Level 1 class to have a "subject line" in the class.

Because for young children, tales are the language that children's brains understand best.

Jean Piaget once explained that children of this age are at a stage where they use symbols and imagination to understand the world, one ordinary thing becomes anything in a child's head, a hula hoop is a river, a kicking position is a powerful force, and a rehearsal room becomes a big world where children want to participate.

When the child is "in" with the story, the brain begins to work more than moving the body.

He must remember what the mission is now, what orders to wait for.

When to run, when to stop, when to go from crawling to jumping, or from running to kicking.

All of these are actual EF in class.

Matters line and mission sequence recognition = Working Memory

Pre-exit Signal Waiting = Inhibitory Control

Situational posture change = Shifting / Cognitive Flexibility

But the next question is...

If the child is very small, can he do these things himself?

The answer is not all, and here the role of teacher is very important.

Lev Vygotsky called this area the Zone of Proximal Development is the space between "what children can do themselves" and "what children can do when there are adults helping to reinvigorate it."

In class, Junbi did not let the child play, nor did he order the child to "follow the teacher."

But the teacher will gradually lay down the problem, kick the taekwondo, put the rules a little harder than what the child can do himself, hard enough for the child to try, but not so hard that he decomposes.

Sometimes the teacher helps to warn

Sometimes teachers play characters.

Sometimes the teacher just stands and waits for the child to think first.

This is a perfect cradling scaffolding, so that children gradually move from "do it because the teacher helps" to "do it yourself."

And looking deeper, classes like this are also very special areas for young children.

Donald Winnicott calls this kind of space Transitional Space, the middle space between the real world and the imaginary world.

In the real world, a child is running, jumping, kicking, queuing and listening to commands, but in the imaginary world, he is on a mission in a tale.

These two worlds are nested, and because it's a safe space,

So the child dares to try, dares to miss, dares to come back, dares to use his own body and emotions more.

This is why Junbi's young child taekwondo class

Not pretending to be the fastest.

But to create experiences for children to gradually get to know themselves.

The kid's starting to know I can stop myself. I can wait. I can listen.

I can change my plans, I can fall and start again, I can live with my friends, and I can enjoy learning.

For 3-5 years old, this is more important than high kicking or perfect posturing, because before a child learns difficult skills, he must have a ready-to-learn brain.

Young children learn best from playing.

In the story that he wanted to grow up on his own. 💛

# Junbi Taekwondo # Taekwondo, kid # Brain development # EF