Noodle sticks at Stony Brook.

Yesterday Grace picked up Noah and I was supposed to meet them at Stony Brook, which also has a playground. I brought four pool noodles to use as sticks. But Jonah couldn't really get it, and then Grace didn't want to run through the sticks form, and help Noah. I had been waiting for a while before they got there and as Jonah ran around the playground two older kids were stick fighting with water squirters.
"Don't do it that hard you're going to break the sticks!" one yelled. Because their sticks were made out of plastic. Weak enough to break but hard enough to hurt if they happened to hit each other, or Jonah for that matter. Their mom (or woman in charge of them) eventually yelled at them to stop.
Well when my kids took no interest to my foam sticks I asked one kid (in front of his mother or woman in charge of hime) if he wanted to learn a stick fighting game. Earlier I didn't know if his parents were there and I figured it would be creepy to ask kids to play if their parents weren't around. Plus Jonah might have ran off. Now we only had a few minutes before we would all head home but that was enough time to run through the stick game and maybe my kids would come over and at least watch if they saw older children doing it.
He picked up the game pretty quickly. Of course their were hesitations and distracted moments. He hesitated to jump over the stick. "You think too much!" his mother scolded.
He sweeped high to on my leg hitting them, "You're supposed to sweep lower!" his mother yelled at him again. This told me though that she was watching and approved of him playing the stick game with a strange adult. It also meant, I didn't have to say any of these things. Had they been real sticks, it would have been a bad idea to play in the playground, but also, if we got hit, even grazed, the mood of play would turn sour. But with foam noodles, it didn't.
Anyway, after we finished, he wanted to keep going. But our family had to leave. It was great to have someone who WANTED to do a kung fu drill over and over and over. That's never happened before. But of course I never tried to teach spontaneously for fun as a game with no other motive or purpose. The stress of a performance, or say supervisors looking for a beneficial "curriculum" can sour the mood just as much as a wooden stick to the leg or face I guess.