Teach Primary Issue 18.5

• What characteristics do you need to be a valuable team member? • What key sporting traits link different Olympic sports and athletes together? • What are the key differences between individual and team events? • How could you help a teammate who is finding something hard? technique first. Emphasise the ‘push’ away from the body. Let children have a practice throw before recording scores. Badminton balance relay • Set up a relay race across multiple lanes, cones along each lane for the children to navigate around. • The first pupil from each team balances a shuttlecock on a badminton racket. • Pupils to begin on the whistle. They must complete the course, without dropping the shuttlecock, and then hand both the racket and shuttlecock to the next person in their team. If the shuttlecock falls off, that pupil starts again from the beginning of the course. • The first team back is the winning team and gets the points. Shot put • Set up a wide starting line with a small run-up (1–2m). Create three ‘throwing zones’ along the line, so that multiple children can compete at the same time. • Children take a tennis or hockey ball and, following a small run-up, throw the ‘shot put’ as far as they can, using the shoulder pass technique. Pupils’ feet should remain on or behind the line and all shot puts should be thrown in the same direction on the go-ahead of the coach. • Zones are used as a progressive points system. The further the throw, the higher the points. • Record and combine the scores for each team. Coaching points: Demonstrate the throwing • Expand the one-day takeover to a whole week’s worth of intra-school Olympic competition. Display all the classes’ scores in a corridor or your school hall, and update them daily as the competition progresses. Take KS2 pupils to look at the scoreboard and challenge them to tell you how many extra points they’ll need to get that day to move up the rankings. • Progress the single day to five days over the course of a term, engaging pupils for longer and encouraging further teamwork. • Introduce additional events that aren’t traditionally involved in school sports. • Involve other schools in a cluster to make this an inter-school competition. This could be done in an intense week, or over the duration of a summer term. EXTENDING THE LESSON Coaching points: For KS1, if a pupil drops the shuttlecock they can restart from where it fell. Allow children to practise before the race. Football challenge • Set up a penalty shootout area and mark out a distance from penalty spot to goal. • Select a goalkeeper from another team. • Each member of the team has five penalties. • Combine the total penalties scored from each member of the team for a total score. Coaching points: For KS1, reduce the distance from the spot to the goal. Nerf target practice: • Set up 10 plastic cups (bowling pins format) on top of a table. Make a firing line 3–5m from the table. • Following a safety briefing, pupils each get three attempts to fire at the cups, scoring a point for each cup they hit. Coaching points: For KS1 reduce the distance to the table. Encourage children to keep their eye on the cups rather than on the Nerf gun to help increase accuracy. 3 | REFLECTIONS It’s likely that some or most children will have never had a go at sports such as shot put, so once pupils have had their turn, critique their technique to provide positive ways in which they can improve. Ultimately though, this is a team activity, with each ‘country’ combining individual effort to get their total scores. Jordan Southgate is operations manager at Premier Education. He has worked in a delivery and coaching environment for over 15 years. “The multi-sport structure offers something for all abilities and ages” USEFUL QUESTIONS www.teachwire.net | 77