Touch of Japanese

Tools:

1. This is a physical exercise as well as knowing your Aiki-Japanese. All students need to touch whatever is called for. For example “Te – Hand in Japanese” or “Chudan – belly”
2. Everyone else has to perform that movement.
3. Whoever is last to touch this, has to turn off the camera. Of course they can still participate, but now you could continue this till everyone is finished.

Think of these words: Ashi – foot or leg. Atama – head. Hara – lower abdomen. Hiji – elbow. Hiza – knee. Kata – shoulder. Katate dori – grab wrist. Kokyu – breath. Koshi – hips. Kote – forearm. Kubi – neck. Men – face. Mune – chest. Sode – sleeve. Tekubi – wrist. Te – hand. Use – arm. Yubi – finger.

And to finish off: Aikido weapons or Clothing (so they need to collect them where ever they are.)

Shape Up

Tools:

Facilitator: Before you start, select ‘gallery mode’ for your video conference tool so you can view everyone’s thumbnails in a grid format (all thumbnails should be the same size).

1. Call out a shape (for example: the three Aikido shapes: circle/ triangle/Square. To make it more difficult, try letters “A-B-C- Etc.” maybe you can create your dojo name!?)
2. Ask people to move their arms and hands up/down or left/right to recreate the shape in the gallery mode you’re viewing.
3. When the team has managed to make the shape, ask them to hold it so you can take a screenshot. Share it with with the team and try to do another shape, progressively making them more complicated.

Virtual Charades

Tools:

1. Pair each participant with someone else.
2. Ask each person to choose something Aikido. So think of attack(s), movements, (aikido) book titles, (aikido) movies that their partner will have to imitate in front of the webcam to the rest of the group.
3. Tell participants to send the title they chose in a direct message to their partner.
4. In pairs, take turns acting out what your partner sent you. The rest of the group has 1 minute to guess what you’re mimicking.

Alternative: Play emoji charades. Choose an emoji and act it out in front of the webcam. Everyone else has to guess which emoji you’re trying to be.

Once upon a seminar…

Tools:

1. Assign numbers to each participant, starting with n°1.
2. Ask person n°1 to start telling an Aikido story in a direct message to person n°2 (maximum two lines).
3. Once they receive the message, person n°2 continues the story in another direct message to person n°3 (without including the first part), and so on…
4. In the end, everyone needs to read out the story in the order you started.

Alternative starts: The first time I came into the dojo… During the night sensei walked back home… Ai-ki-do would be very different when there was NO ai…

Emoji Challenge

Tools:

1. Ask everyone to think of something in the dojo or Aikido related.
2. Once they’re ready, tell everyone to describe this in their chat tool using emojis only.
3. Take turns guessing each title during a video call.

You can use this tool to get more emoji’s:

https://getemoji.com

GIF Tournament

Tools:

Facilitator: Prepare a list of some phrases/techniques/excersise before the session.

1. Pick a phrase (for example: “Kubishime”) and add it to the chat.
2. Ask everyone to find the best GIF to represent their feeling or struggle for this word/phrase. (Tip: GIPHY has a great selection of GIFs).
3. Once everyone has added a GIF you can: A. Start a voting session in the mural so people can vote for their favorite one. Or B. Discusse one of the GIF’s that are raise questions.
4. To make it a tournament, you can have several rounds and pick a winner at the end.

First Single/Album

Tools:

1. Ask the following question: “Which song has to come up on the radio and you start thinking on doing Aikido?”
2. Let everyone search an image of the single/album cover and add it to the (private) chat.
3. Let everyone share where they bought the single, why they liked it at the time and what format it was (8track, cassette, CD, vinyl, mp3…)

Facilitator: After the session, surprise the team with a music playlist of all the singles. It will mess up everyone’s Spotify algorithms

This post is written by: Mural and edited with Aikido examples by Ando Aikido.