Active Enrichment: Sports Themed Activities across the Curriculum

Active Enrichment: Sports Themed Activities across the Curriculum, by John Senior, offers 100 sports-themed extension activities for use across the curriculum, using students’ enjoyment of sport to enrich learning throughout their secondary school

Written by John Senior

Sport and physical education offer opportunities for all students to achieve when properly delivered and negotiated with the student. Good enrichment work should challenge, enthuse and delight. A themed approach offers the student the opportunity to ask higher order questions, develop the ability to debate and think critically for themselves. It is a mark of higher order thinking to be able to make connections not just between the subjects taught within a curriculum but across all levels of knowledge, all subjects and experiences.

Active Enrichment provides activities and material that can meet the enrichment needs of the gifted and talented student, and those of a broader able audience. Many of the activities can be used for extension and enrichment with larger groups than is normally associated with gifted and talented children.

This resource will help you to:

• Support your students’ growth as independent learners
• Meet the need for intellectual challenge for children through involvement in sport
• Direct your students not only to an appreciation of sport but also to having fun and gaining pleasure from thinking
• Challenge and stretch your students as much as possible and enable them to prosper through achievement.

The activities in the resource are arranged in four groups:

• 10-minute enrichment and early day activities suitable for home, on the way to school, or at school – either as physical-intellectual tasks, practical activities or discussion tasks
• Lesson-length activities, which can be extended from a lesson into a day and from a day into a term and beyond
• Day-long enrichment and extended projects, which can be the beginning of life-long interests and the starting point for other enrichment directions to be explored
• After-school and extended-day enrichment activities or discussion starters that are aimed at stimulating thinking on the way home or after school.

With a huge interest in sport being developed by Sport England, The PE, School Sport and Club Links strategy (PESSCL), Ofsted, Youth Sport Trust and the 2012 Olympics Games in London, the time is right to excite, enrich and stretch the gifted and talented child using a themed approach.