Quickie Coolness

I don't have much time this week and I haven't gotten any new pictures of the boys, but this one was too cool not to share.

The boys were at Tae Kwon Do yesterday. Peter's been trying to remember to practice at home to get some extra credit points at class. He's getting ready for his next belt test at the end of next week. He seems to have it all down fine. He's very confident about it all when he's practicing.

Grady knows that after his next belt test in October, he'll get to move up to the advanced little kids class. He's very excited about it and he's been a super example to the newer kids in his current class. There have been three boys about his size and age who are just about ready to move up and the teachers have been stressing the importance of being leaders in class right now.

So for Grady's class this week, they were working on Memory. They chose one of eight different skills to work on each week, so Memory means learning your parents' names, phone numbers and your address, plus having a pattern of steps to work out.

Each belt means an increase in the number of steps necessary. So for the first belt, they had 7 steps. I think right now Grady is supposed to be up to 16. But he's learned all 20 and his teachers know he's had them down for a while. But they can't really give him something new until he's gotten to the next belt up. They're very strict about it.

His one teacher tries to make sure he's challenged each class, so she gives him extra stuff like having him do the whole pattern without her calling out the numbers and stuff.

Well, yesterday she had him go through the whole pattern and then she wanted him to turn around and do it. But the word she used was "backwards". So he did. He started at number 20 and got all the way down to 1 with no mistakes. I have no idea how his brain kept it all straight because we've never gone through that order at home. He pulled it out all by himself.

The teacher was very impressed and gave him an extra sticker for that. I was impressed too. I didn't get a chance to take a movie of it but it would have been worthwhile to see.