Here’s a great kids karate game you can use as a warm-up or a reward at the end of class, that kids go crazy for…

It’s called “The Safe Game” and here’s how it works:

• It’s basically a game of tag / cat and mouse with a bunch of “safe groups”, and requires 10 or more  students for best results.
• Students pair-up and stand side by side at random locations on the floor, with a minimum of about 5 feet between groups. These are the “safe groups”.
• Then choose one student to be the Cat (the tagger) and one other to be the Mouse (the runner).
• On your command the game begins and the Cat must catch the Mouse. The only way the Mouse can be safe is to run to a safe group and yell, “SAFE!”.
• This action releases the person on the far side of the safe group, who now becomes the Mouse. The Cat must now catch this new person, and the new Mouse must run to another group and call “SAFE”.
• In the event the Mouse is tagged by the Cat, roles are reversed and now the person who was being chased is now the chaser.
• The game continues until students pass out from exhaustion, or you decide that it’s gone on long enough!

Some rules:

1. There can only ever be 2 “safe” people in a safe group. The person on the outside is ALWAYS the person who is released.
2. If the person on the closest end of the group accidentally runs (instead of the outer person), the game stops, the person who broke now becomes the Cat, the original Cat becomes the Mouse, and the original mouse is safe.
3. To make this more challenging you can allow/deny “tag-backs”. You can also have 3 Mice and one Cat, so there are fewer safe groups.
4. To make it more karate-related, have each of the safe groups stand in a different karate stance.

Try it out and let us know how it works for you!

Enjoy!

~ Jason