PlanJam!From your screen to the scene

They use spatulas, they use umbrellas. They hit lamps, couch cushions and, even occasionally, you. Your children need an out for their saber mania. Enroll them in the Elite Musketeer Fencer’s Club, a child-friendly club that provides lessons and fencing etiquette. Located in the southern area of San Francisco’s Bay, Elite has been teaching Olympic Fencing to children and adults since 2003.

Recently featured in the American Fencing Magazine, this quality forum will each your little musketeers through games and activities that are directly integrated into the lessons’ techniques and focuses, helping students to develop better motor skills, focus, physical fitness, and social navigation. The sport itself teaches a high concentration of those beneficial developmental elements only offered through juvenile sports and competition.

Plus: fencing is just cool. From age six, your child can learn a sport that dates back to the Renaissance (the first known official reference to swordsmanship coming from William Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor: “Alas sir, I cannot fence.”); and carries with it a heft and history that you just don’t get with, say, a video game. What a wonderful way to introduce your children to a new form of exercise that also teaches them concentration, confidence, and a defining sense of self. Fencing has sustained today as one of the only four sports which has been featured at every single modern Olympic Games.

The Elite Musketeer’s Fencing Club not only offers convenient classes on Saturdays (freeing up your already overloaded week nights, a bit at least), it also offers camps where Little Musketeers can completely assume their epee-esque identities, say, from 12-4 or 5-9pm for three concentrated days. Birthday parties are also offered, which includes a fun introduction to the art of swordplay, a demonstration of the sport, and opportunities to fence under qualified instructors.

Located in a nice, new facility that includes a large fencing gymnasium and even a lounge and play area, this fencing club also provides all of the gear and materials needed for lessons and sparring. This fencing club has proven truly elite, and will allow your little musketeers a forum for their fencing fetish, and will hopefully save that newly-covered lampshade. En guarde!