Letter to Parents

Dear Parents,

Congratulations on enrolling your child to their first kendo practice.

The kids kendo class will focus primarily on friendship and fun while introducing kendo basics and Japanese culture.  In these first few lessons, we hope your child will learn to respect his classmates, his shinai (bamboo stick), sensei (teacher), and dojo (environment).  Safety is another aspect of the class we would like to focus on and we hope you can help reinforce in the dojo and at home.  Participation in class will be subject to the leading sensei.

For the first class, please have your child wear comfortable clothing,  Masks are optional.  Kendo is a bare footed martial art.  Shoes and socks will be lined up outside of the dojo (gym) - hope they will do this at home too!  We will prepurchase a shinai (bamboo sword) and bring it to the first class.  If your child shows proper management and care his/her shinai, he might be able to bring it home to show you!  We will start posting more information and handouts about kendo on this website.  We hope you can also come and watch.

We have been doing kendo since we were both 12 years old and decided to continue kendo into adulthood.  We have found that there has been kendo in every place we have lived and we cherist all of the friendships we have forged with others.  As parents, we hope our children can try different activities in hopes they find something they enjoy and learn things they can not learn in school.

Kendo is a life long journey and we want children to know that they improve if they have the support and encouragement through hard work.  We hope we can share some of the things we have learned and hope to form a strong community with you.  We ask for your support both inside and outside the dojo to make this program even more successful. 

To make it easier, we have created a checklist section.  If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. 

Thank you,

Ai and George Sensei