Ice Skating... (Now with added picture-y goodness)

...FINALLY able to escape the classroom for a little while, Friday was as much of a treat for me as it was for the kids.

Each month in Kindergarten we have some kind of organised activity but as it's turned out, every single one of them since September has involved doing something in the classroom (except the Halloween party, but that was still within the grounds of Talkster.)

Thankfully this month, the last month before the kids leave, we'd managed to work it into the schedule so that this months activity was to be able to go ice skating.
Korean's are pretty big on ice skating as Kim-Yu-Na, the number one ranked ice dancer, is one of the countries national heroes (not quite on as big-a scale as Park Ji Sung, but she sure is popular!) But despite that I wasn't expecting too much from the ice rink that we would be heading too.

As it turned out, it was actually of a decent standard as it was home to Suwon's Ice Hockey team (yeah, I didn't realise they had one either) and there was actually quite a lot of people there when we turned out. Possibly because it was the last official day of school holidays for children.

Once we'd geared up with skates and helmets, yes, helmets. It was time to take a first few daunting steps onto the ice and to make the kids feel a little better about themselves I decided to go first. It's been about a year or so since I actually donned a pair of ice skates but after steadying myself for a few seconds I was pretty confident about not falling over.
The kids on the other hand....they had a few issues.

Andrew, the oldest kid in my class was actually a pretty decent skater. He could manage to make it around at a pretty good pace without too many incidents of him falling over. Elizabeth, the only girl in the class, started off at a struggle but once she stopped relying on me for momentum she actually managed to pick it up pretty well.
Larry, who I expected to struggle with skating, took some time to pick it up and by the second hour of us skating he'd managed to ensure that on average he only fell over one time every circuit.

Now I'm not sure how I was the first time I set foot on ice but I'm pretty sure that Sun, who struggled most with skating, was an accurate representation of how I might have got on. I'm not entirely sure of what his problem was, but I reckon that it took roughly five seconds before he fell over, and once I'd picked him up, it was roughly three seconds before he fell over again.
He really just couldn't cope with being on the ice at all.

No sonner had he stood up was he on the floor again, and the problem, not very accurately diagnosed can only be through his confidence that he was going to be able to skate as fast as everyone that he saw there. As soon as his legs were about to fall from underneath him, he'd panic and start moving his legs even faster.....the outcome of this was obviously for him to call over quicker than he was already going to.

It's tough to count the amount of times that I had to pick the poor kid up of the floor but at least there were no tears and he was quite happy to get back up on his feet and try again!
I was extremely impressed with the kids and their attitude actually, because I'd say that ice skating is very difficult and even as an adult if I wasn't able to do it then I would be getting pretty frustrated with the amount of times that I feel over. But they always had a big smile on their faces and would pick themselves back up and try again.

Unfortunately despite finding it necessary to blog about the most interesting I have done in the last couple of weeks, I am relying on someone elses photos to show picture evidence that I was actually able to get out of the classroom for an afternoon. Hopefully I'll be able to attach them soon.

Apologies about the lack of recent blogs folks, I haven't been up to very much at all and it seems that it is finally coming to 'winding down' time in terms of my activities. Something that I was hoping wouldn't happen....Hopefully within the next few weeks I'll have some more entertaining things to blog about....

Ben xxx

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

Sir Francis Bacon