Two students from Latimer school attended the official opening of Volleyball England’s National Volleyball training centre. This state of the art Olympic standard Volleyball centre is based at the Kettering Conference Centre. Supporter 2 Reporter (part of Radiowaves: www.radiowaves.co.uk) is a project where youngsters train to be sports reporters in preparation for the 2012 Olympics. There are various groups attached to Northants Study Centres, the Latimer girls attended their initial training at Diamonds Study centre at Easter.
After the official opening and speeches from Volleyball England staff, we watched the Junior National Teams (girls and boys) and GB men’s sitting team (future paraolympians) in training and the reporters interviewed some of their players and officials. They spoke with Maria Bertelli (GB Volleyball player, 65 caps), Dan Hunter (GB Volleyball player who had recently been promoted from youth to senior squad), Leo Trench (Talent spotter, Volleyball England), Robbie Barrett (sitting squad captain) and Rakesh Misuria. (sitting squad player) Matt Rogers, Sitting Volleyball development manager advised the reporters about their questions.
The National Volleyball Centre (NVC) will provide top class sports facilities for International athletes and competitions in the lead up to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. East Midlands Development Agency, Kettering Borough Council and Northampton Enterprise Limited have also provided funding which has helped to create the centre into a top class venue by creating four volleyball courts, new seating areas and a social and educational area. The Kettering Conference Centre has an excellent combination of both conference and indoor sporting facilities with good wheelchair access.
Lisa Wainwright, CEO of Volleyball England expresses her delight on the centre: “We identified within our strategic plan 2009/13 our aspiration to establish a National Centre for training and competition to ensure we can provide top quality facilities and services to our talented athletes and all our educators within the sport.”
The EAL group from Unity College and The Duston School who attended the summer challenge at Steelbacks returned during the October half term on Friday 30th October at the Cobblers Study Centre for a ‘top-up’ language day. There are 6 different nationalities and languages between them and they are from years 8-11. It was great to see them all again and they returned with their usual liveliness and enthusiasm! This project is funded by Northants County Council’s Race Equality Team.
Tatiana Worek from Barclaycard came to mentor for the day and was an invaluable help. She is Polish and a EAL speaker herself, which shows the children how far they can go in improving their English. She was able to translate, offer 1-1 support and assist in all activities.
A quick game of ‘gutter ball’ to get going, then on to a speaking-based stadium tour led by centre manager Jean Limpitlaw around NTFC Sixfields Stadium. In pairs, the students listened to information about all the stadium’s rooms and facilities and prepared a short piece to camera summarizing their useage and talking about who uses them. The groups explored the conference rooms, reception area/ticket office, police cells, Carlsberg Lounge, stands, tunnel and dugouts. They later watched the first and youth teams training. Previously, the group were offered tickets to watch NTFC play against Rochdale.
The children learnt some new vocabulary and practiced their speaking, listening and presentation skills. The task was to transfer the knowledge and information from the tour into sentences. This proved quite difficult in some cases, and some of our students overcame their fear of speaking on camera and improved their sentence structure. Others meanwhile, were only too happy to speak and turned their commentary into mini-dramas! On watching the video clips back, it was decided that everyone looked and sounded like professional TV presenters with a great deal of knowledge about Sixfields. Check out some of their videos.
Stadium orienteering came next, with pupils working in small groups to solve numeracy clues to find the right stand, row and seat number in order to collect letters. This activity required learners to use their knowledge of prepositions, directions and compass points. A previous lesson had been taught during summer school around this area, and with a quick reminder, students applied this knowledge. Using the letters to make anagrams was a follow up, and then speaking in front of the group to show how to put the various words found into a sentence.
2010’s Football World Cup in South Africa was the theme for the most exciting activity of the day. Jean showed the group a powerpoint about the World Cup (complete with African music) and asked everyone to play along and imagine they had tickets to go there. But due to very expensive flights and tickets, they would have to camp when they got to South Africa.
In two groups, the youngsters had to put up a tent, taking photos of every stage, according to the instructions. This was most amusing to watch, with some ‘expert campers’ becoming obvious immediately as well as the less experienced! As well as speaking, (English is the common language for this group) some great social skills were evident: teamwork, communication and co-operation.
Once the tents were up, and photos of each stage put into a powerpoint, both groups were asked to write their own version of the instructions according to their photos. (Whilst sitting in their new homes!) Each student chose a photo each and wrote an explanatory sentence. Anna had asked the children to focus on some specific aspects of their writing: tenses, prepositions and time connectives. A group presentation was last, with some confident speakers. There was quite a lot of tent and camping vocabulary to incorporate too. To see their work, visit the EAL work page.
Speed stacking was a really fun ‘brain-break’, Helena Weedon led the group through various techniques and challenges. There was a very competitive atmosphere!
The day was a great success, a great opportunity for our EAL students to experience a different sporting environment, as well as practice their English in a different way. Everyone enjoyed it and it is clear to see individual’s confidence is growing.
Firstly I would like to thank everyone at the Study Centre, for such a warm welcome on Friday!
Comment from Barclaycard mentor:
I really enjoyed meeting and working with you all, so much so I hope I can get involved in such events in the future.
I was amazed by the confidence of all those attending this ‘top up’ language day, especially as I understood some had only been using English for no more than a few months – amazing!
I was enjoying myself so much and everyone was really getting involved that I didn’t notice how quickly the time had passed – it only goes to show, how much fun we had and how well organized the event was.
I now know, who I should contact if ever I need to put up a tent J
Meanwhile I’ll keep practicing speed stacking and hopefully be able to challenge some of you next I we meet.
In a meantime I wish you all many happy days, and I hope to see you again!
Jean, Anna – thank you very much for such positive feedback.
Kindest Regards,
Tatiana
This week saw the last sessions of transition/PfS at Danetre and William Parker Schools. Both groups of year 7s have come a long way since before the summer and put their knowledge and experiences to good use by creating transition advice leaflets for year 6s.
This was alongside solution-focused circle time, Saints rugby kit note-taking, punctuation kung-fu and cup speed stacking, phew!
We wish all the students the best for the rest of their secondary school time.
As part of the transition project at Danetre and William Parker, year 8 students were invited along to answer questions about their transition experiences. After talking about questioning and interviewing techniques, the year 7s planned their questions to ask, such as:
“What worries did you have and how did you overcome them?”
“Did you get lost and what did you do?”
“Do you prefer this school to your primary and why?”
“How did you make friends?”
“Did you have any family or friends already at this school and how did they help you settle in?”
The year 8s at both schools were excellent in providing clear answers and were very honest about their experiences. They had some good advice on how to handle a wide variety of problems and situations such as forgetting homework, after school clubs, preparing equipment and kit the night before, which teachers to ask for what, where to go if you lose something, what to do if you are bullied, how to get extra help and how to find your way around the school.
To hear what other activities the students were involved in this week, visit their pages:
The PfS style transition project has restarted at William Parker and Danetre schools with the same groups of children who attended before the summer in year 6. These students are now in year 7 and have had a few weeks to settle into their new secondary school. This project involves 2 hour sessions consisting of PfS literacy and numeracy activities, brain breaks, transition work and school information.
To see how the groups are getting on and see the children in action, visit the transition page:
Year 8 students at Thomas Becket have started a new term and year of Double Club. (http://double.northantsstudycentres.org/) Beccy Roseman and Patrick Franks continue to run the project, which has been successfully embedded within the school’s study support provision. This term, community coach James Mellor, from Northants County Cricket Club, is coaching cricket and multi skills and the group will be visiting Saints and Steelbacks study centres later in the term. They will also be attending a Northampton Town football match.
The last day of summer school was spent looking at cricketer’s diet for match days and training sessions. The group talked about healthy and unhealthy foods, a balanced diet, food groups and energy. They played speaking and listening games ‘fruit and veg snap’ and ‘I went to the supermarket and bought….’ to come up with a wide range of food vocabulary. As well as working on memory skills.
The students used ‘iweb’ to create cricket player menus, describing the kinds of foods and meals cricket players would eat. They used photos, graphics and text effects to write about their serving suggestions.
To round off the morning, students were presented with their certificates for taking part in the summer school. They were also given prizes from the cricket club shop and their reports.
The afternoon saw the last coaching session with James: rugby, cricket and football.
It’s been a great two weeks, all the study centres staff have enjoyed working with this group and had a lot of fun. The students have worked really hard, giving up their school holidays to improve their English. Their confidence has grown, along with their social skills.
On the penultimate day of Summer School our EAL students worked hard on their creative writing skills. In the morning the students worked on creating a story to go with sports headlines taken from a variety of newspapers. This required the students to use their imagination and written English skills. An extra task for the students was to include six National Curriculum recommended ‘high frequency’ words and their derivatives into their news story.
After the morning break, the EAL students exercised their creativity once again by coming up with ‘excuse’ stories. They watched a DVD containing some famous sporting mistakes and then were challenged to write their own excuses stories. This allowed the students to demonstrate their humour whilst writing from the viewpoint of another person.
Before lunch, the students were split into groups of three and were set the task of building a paper tower. The wining group was the team that built the tallest free- standing tower out of ten sheets of paper, one roll of sellotape and one pair on scissors in fifteen minutes. The teams had to communicate their design ideas with each other and then had to present their finished tower to the rest of the group explaining their ideas. Hamida, Bianca and Beer built the tallest tower at a height of 77cm!
After lunch the students discussed the issue of racism in sport (and wider society) and worked in groups to create posters containing anti-racism slogans and statements such a ‘Kick Racism Off The Pitch!” and ”Kick It Out, Stay Out!” The students discussed the consequences of racist behaviour at sports matches and how racism could be tackled.
Yesterday the EAL Summer Challenge learners kicked off the day exploring the stadium here at the Steelbacks. They used prepositions, such as opposite, behind, below, above, to the left, and to the north, to direct their fellow students around the stadium.
Sports captions were the focus of the next activity. The students chose actions shots of sportsmen and placed a caption on the photo using Comic Life. A brief description was produced to sum up the before and after. There were some interesting ideas!
The afternoon was spent with multi-sports coach James playing football. The students learnt to communicate on the field as well as have a good time.
![Cobblers[1].S.C.logo](http://ontheroad.northantsstudycentres.org/files/2009/11/Cobblers1.S.C.logo.jpg "Cobblers[1].S.C.logo"){kind=logo}
