Entries Tagged 'Steelbacks study centre' ↓

To find out what the year 8s from Becket got up to at the Steelbacks, visit:

http://double.northantsstudycentres.org/

Take a look at what we got up to this summer at the Steelbacks Study Centre!

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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.

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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.

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Posted by Jaimie

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.

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posted by Vicky

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.

David signed autographs and posed for photos.

For more on David Sales, visit http://www.cricinfo.com/england/content/player/20049.html

http://www.davidsalesbenefityear.co.uk/profile.html

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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.

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Posted by Jaimie

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!

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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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posted by Sara.

On the second day of summer school, our EAL students worked on their English written and speaking skills. Lynn took them on a stadium tour where they answered questions about the facilities. They used this information to compose a comic strip using applemac programme comiclife. We focused on sentence structure, word order and descriptive language. There were some very creative efforts and as a whole group we talked about English conventions when writing speech. 

Visit our student’s work page:  http://ontheroad.northantsstudycentres.org/english-as-an-additional-language/eal-students-work/

Later in the day the group looked at some sports poems. They discussed what certain lines meant and dissected English sayings/slang. They wrote their own acrostic poems after mind-mapping sports vocabulary. This really helped as they had plenty of ideas to choose from. Some chose to write their poem around dancing, fighting, football and tennis. They used garageband to record their poems, adding sound effects and music. 

Please visit our EAL page