Year 9 lads from the school visited the Saints Study Centre and Franklins Stadium on Thursday 17th July with Mrs Button and Mrs Lester. They were really engaged with the activities they did and loved being at the stadium. There were even a few players wandering about.
They did a coaching session with Liam and Rowland, then a stadium tour with Saints Study Centre mentor Vicky Campkin where they undertook a literacy quiz. Back in the study centre they did an ICT session using the digital photos taken on the tour to construct a comic strip.
The lads are keen sportmen and enjoyed their rugby, several playing for local clubs around Towcester. This was a follow up reward trip to the work they did in school with Anna in previous months.
Year 7 visited Cobblers on Wednesday 9th July as a follow up to their Classroom Champions project in school with Anna Letts and Mrs Button.
Students went on a stadium tour led by Cobblers Study Centre manager Jean Limpitlaw, visiting the changing rooms, Carlsberg Bar, dugouts, stands, press area, police cells. They were able to watch the first and youth teams in training on the back training pitch. It rained all day but that didn’t bother them. 
Next they competed in teamwork initiative games led by Margaret Hillyer in the West Stand’s concourse area. This included group finding using observation skills, drainpipe tennis runs passing and body hoopla. Pupils got very competitive.
After lunch, there was stadium orienteering where teams had to solve literacy and numeracy skills to find letters around the ground. This was also a fitness test as trekking around proved very tiring and we all got soaked. Back in the Carlsberg Lounge to solve the anagrams from the letters found.
The other activity was an ICT session in the nice dry study centre. Students used the digital stadium tour photos to make a comic strip using publisher. They experimented with titles, colour, speech bubbles, backgrounds. Some had time to write a blog for the Cobblers Study Centre website.
The children really enjoyed the day and got a lot out of it. The hands on approach to learning really suited them. Their behaviour, enthusiasm and motivation was excellent. It was great for Anna, Mrs Button and Mrs Lester to see them out of school in a different setting, as well as a positive follow up to work doing in school.
Day 4 year 7
NTFC community coach Darren Norton visited the school for a football session which the children worked hard during. They covered throw ins, goalkeeping and ball skills.
The students finished this project with a largely literacy based day. They read a chapter of “Bend it like Beckham” and discussed the feelings of the narrator in relation to various situations. This covered racism, fouling in football, family and friendships. We discussed feelings and emotions, adjectives and how to express anger and frustration. Using the chapter to pick out the relevant information and thereby reading for a purpose. Clips from the DVD version of the book were watched to see if the children’s opinions were accurate.
Famous cricketers featured in the 2005 Ashes DVD were analysed in their batting and bowling to see what their 5 senses would experience. Students constructed a powerpoint presentation detailing their ideas, experimenting with photos, speech bubbles and text boxes.
The maths lesson conisted of costing a journey NTFC would take to play away against Bornemouth. Children had to choose hotels, food, transport and entertainment options and costs the journey for 20 players/team staff. They worked in pairs and there was a great difference in total cost at the end, showing that some people were more generous than others with their budget.
Just for fun and teamwork, communication and engineering skills, groups woprked topgether to construct tall free standing towers out of marshmallows and raw spaghetti. You can only imagine the state of the classroom afterwards! Some groups showed some very complicated engineering feats with their towers and bases, while others seemed to favour the ’stuck together lump look’! Most did stand up at the end.
Head of year 7 Miss Turton came into a lesson to assist Anna in presenting the group with their certificates for ’striving to improve’ their literacy, numeracy and ICT skills. The children were able to tell her what kind of work they had been doing, what they had learnt and why they enjoyed it. They are much more confident in themselves now and will carry the skills learnt here into their normal school lessons.
School TA Mrs Derby said about the project “I feel all the pupils worked really hard the majority of the time and were all champions when focussed on a task.”
Year 7s will be attending the Steelbacks Study Centre in July for a follow up to this project and as a reward for all their hard work. They are looking forward to this as there are many cricket fans.
Year 7s have now started their Classroom Champions stint with the PfS Study Centres. 22 students from across the year were chosen and on 5th March met in various rooms in the school. The main focus of the morning was match reporting. Children watched some match footage from Arsenal TV of Arsenal versus Blackburn, Prague etc last year. They had to take notes and answer questions using their observational and listening skills. Afterwards, they wrote exciting and emotive match reports on powerpoint presentations.
In the second week, the year 7s worked in groups to produce a presentation poster on world cup cricket geography. They had to choose a country what competes in this tournament and find out facts about it using the internet: weather, currency, language, main cities, sports stadiums, players, team manager etc. They took notes and found different and attractive ways to present this information.
Students took trundle wheels outside to measure the football pitch and tennis courts. Back in class, they calculated perimeter and area. One group also played the ‘Double Dice’ spelling game.
Sponne comments about Classroom Champions Lessons (year 7 cohort)
“I didn’t know anything about football, now I know quite a lot about football. I like these sessions because they are fun and I learn lots”. Jack Plumer
“I enjoyed the days, we did different activities and they were really fun, especially the rugby. The coach was cool.” Emma Duffy
“I liked the Arsenal TV activity, it helped me understand how to analyse action. The maths was good because it helped me do mental maths”. Keoni Benjamin
“I think the lessons are fun because it’s different to normal maths, English, ICT lessons where you sit at a desk and talk. We use the computer to help us understand, and use our research skills. Rugby coaching was the best, it was more fun than normal rugby”. Olivia Martin
“The lessons are fun, we learnt about maths, listening skills and computer skills. The rugby was my favourite because I enjoy PE the most”. Louis Bortoli
“It’s fun because it’s not boring. The maths skills were useful: adding, dividing. I learnt how to take notes. I liked the rugby, the coach was good”. Leanne Brown
“I have learnt lots of things, sums, how to present things on computer. Communicate with people, learning more about other people”. Chris Hickey
“Co-operating with other people. I learnt how to do multiplication, and in the rugby how to pass the ball. The coach was funny.” Kyle Thompson
“We have been learning maths English through sports. It’s a bit easier for me as I’m dyslexic and like to do things hands on. Anna helped me a lot because other teachers don’t give a lot of help. I enjoy rugby”. Jack Brennan
“It’s cool doing the cricket stuff, we made our own shop and described the equipment. I liked the Arsenal games, it was interesting, I know some of the players names now and watched some games I wouldn’t normally. It was good to meet Matt Stevens.” Chris Cross
“I have learned about football and Arsenal, new things. It’s better working in groups, we don’t usually do it in other lessons”. Tom Weatherington
“I like the lessons as they are fun. I have learnt about players and people in my group. I liked the rugby, better than normal PE as you got to tackle.” Lois Bateman
“The lessons are good because when we did the Cobblers maths game, we learnt maths through sports and footballers”. George Husbands
“The lessons are quite good because they help me with my maths, English, ICT using sport. We did cricket geography, wrote a match report, made a cricket shop. The rugby coach was really cool.” Robson Kightley
To bond the group, students worked in 4s to build cricket stumps and bales using only paper, selotape and scissors. The brief was: they had to find some way of the stumps staying up (freestanding) while the bales fell off when a ball was bowled towards them. Structure designs and bases varied but most groups managed to fullfill the brief and have success when ‘bowling’.
Later on, the group looked at the cricket equipment and researched Northants Cricket Club’s club shop online to compare styles, prices and safety information. Later they did a practical rugby session with Saints coach Matt Stewart.
In Spring 08, Sponne school have been part of an engagement and motivational study centre project, a version of Classroom Champions: PfS style activities combined with literacy and numeracy resources from Northampton Town Double Club. PfS Curriculum Practioner Anna Letts visits the school for a series of days throughout Spring to work with 20+ pupils in year 7 and year 9.
The pupils are targeted for literacy especially, those that are capable of achieveing higher national curriculum levels than they presently do. Getting the students to engage in their tailor-made days will help them to transfer key skills back into their usual lessons. They also do some community coaching with coaches from Northampton’s sports clubs visiting the school: Saints tag rugby and Cobblers football. Follow up visits to several of the sports clubs and PfS study centres are sceduled for July.
This project is funded by Sponne Cluster and organised by Shirley Button and Jo Holliday from Sponne School. Mrs Button has worked with the study centres in the past, through Silverstone PfS sessions and Classroom Champions in South Northants primary schools. She works alongside Anna in delivering these days and provides advice in literacy skills.
So far the students in the year 9 cohort have been writing match reports, player profiles and persuasive paragraphs to justify their fantasy team profiles. They tried on the Saints rugby kit and came up with slogans for a Saints shop to sell the kit by its health and safety aspects. They used NTFC programmes to do an information retrieval exercise: a programme trail crossword. After watching some footage from the Ashes 2005 DVD, students wrote about cricket and the 5 senses: what the batters, bowlers and fielders are feeling, thinking, hearing when they are in action.
The students will be attending a game at Sixfields on 16th February or 1st March to see the players they have been learning about in action.
Students’ comments:
Hannah Sainsbury “This project was good fun, I didn’t know all the people in the group and I got to know them and make new friends. Working as a team was fun.”
Robbie Bouchier “These lessons were fun and very interesting. I didn’t know you could do literacy in this way and learnt some literacy I didn’t know in other lessons.”
Daniel Rumbold “These lessons were different and we got to work in a different way to normal lessons.”
For information on the school:
http://www.sponneschool.northants.sch.uk/home/
