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
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.
On Monday 24th August, the EAL summer school upped-camp and moved to the Saints study centre at Franklins Gardens stadium for a Robolab session. Pete Austen, study centre manager, ran this session on control technology which involves building lego robot ‘buggies’ and programming them by computer to do various things.
Challenges include getting the buggy to turn 360 degrees and stop, go in a straight line and stop at a specific point, park in a garage and a ‘free-for-all’ race. Students really enjoyed this session and worked together well. They got quite competitive for the grand prix at the end. They also learnt not to give up.
This activity encourages communication, teamwork and co-operation skills. As the group have 6 different languages between them, English is the common language. For this session, students had to learn new vocabulary about the robots.
Today out EAL summer school group interviewed Steelbacks player and previous captain David Sales. They asked him questions about his career, teammates, playing skills, fitness, injuries, ambitions, high and low points and batting scores. Each student thought up their own question too. Questions such as: ‘What football team do you support and why?’, ‘What do you do in your free time?’, ‘What countries have you visited to play cricket?’ and ‘What is your ideal car make?’ This is a great way to improve English speaking, listening and pronunciation skills. Everyone was very confident when asking David questions and showed how good their pronunciation is when reading aloud.
They wrote notes which they then applied to the ‘garageband’ voice recording programme on the applemac laptops. Turning notes into complete sentences can be tricky, especially on the spot, but our group managed it well. Students worked in pairs to record their interview, with one of them being ‘David’ and the other the reporter. They added music and sound effects to create the atmosphere of being in a TV or radio studio. We played these back to the rest of the group and there was much amusement as to the sound editing. The pairs had represented David’s answers accurately.
This morning at the Steelbacks, the EAL Summer School Students took part in activities to help improve their punctuation skills. The youngsters had to run around the Northants County Cricket Club on a punctuation trail looking for various symbols that had been hidden around the stadium.
Lynn then enthusiastically led Punctuation Kung-Fu, this involves doing the actions for each punctuation mark with accompanying actions. Anna then asked students to put these into practise by reading through a cricket text (Chronicle and Echo’s Aussies versus Steelbacks build up) while the group applied their king-fu moves at the appropriate places.
The EAL students then went on to talk about punctuation in a football piece, discussing their choices of where to put various punctuation and why.
Jaimie led a memory game involving playing card orders in teams to finish off the morning.
The afternoon was slightly quieter but still exciting, there theme was match reporting. The students began to compile a match report from a video taken of yesterday afternoon’s football coaching. They watched footage of their games and created sentences describing the action. Sports vocabulary was highlighted and the conventions of commentating thought about. Using a word document, everyone started writing their match report up with accompanying photos. To see their match reports, visit the student’s work page.
The X-Box Challenge was the final activity of the day, each student faced an over from world class X-Box bowler Jaimie. They had to record how many runs they scored in their over and as a group, commented on each batter’s performance. Salma was crowned ‘Man of the Match’ with an impressive 13 runs. Comments such as ‘he made a good run after a difficult start’, ’she improved her run rate with an outstanding hit’ and ’some impressive batting after a reluctant start’ were recorded.
Friday 21st August: Today the students finished their fantasy teams, writing explanations for why they had chosen their players.
After a brief interlude of blow football, we carried on with the English listening, speaking and written work, this time ’sport and the five senses’. The students watched some Ashes cricket footage of batters and bowlers. They had to put themselves them into their shoes and think about what they would see, feel, hear taste and touch. Using powerpoint, the group worked very hard on their sentence structure. To see samples of their work, visit the student’s work page.
The day finished with football, cricket rounders, touch rugby and ‘proper’ cricket with community coach James Mellor. We ignored the rain!
Wednesday was another busy day for the EAL students at the Steelbacks summer school. The day started with a visit to the Club Shop where the students undertook a maths challenge based upon items for sale in the shop. The students took inspiration from the shop visit and came back to the centre to design shop adverts for items that they would sell in a Cricket shop of their own. They looked at persuasive language to help advertise their products and used their artistic skills to produce eye catching posters. To see their work, click here.
In the afternoon the students took part in team games. There was lots of laughter as the girls challenged the boys to a game of gutterball followed by a group game of football rounders.
On Thursday the students started the day with a game of group juggling to get their minds alert and ready for learning. They then learnt about the different pieces of cricket kit paying particular attention to descriptive language used to describe it’s flexibility, safety, materials and construction. Students made notes on the most important aspects of the kit and then used this information to produce posters about the cricket kit equipment using the iWeb application on the Mac computers.
Before lunch the students were given the fun challenge of making a tower using 12 jellybeans and 12 cocktail sticks. They managed to finish the towers before giving in to temptation and eating the jellybeans!
The afternoon saw the students working individually to complete a programme trail. This involved students locating information within a programme and using reading and comprehension skills. They then discussed the answers as a group and shared the information that they had found out. Students then made a start on their fantasy football team. With a budget of £50 million they had to choose their 11 players and give reasons why they thought the players would make a good contribution to the team.
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